The Flim Flam Man -Trump
Mar 22, 2017 10:28:15 #
The following was written by "Lexington", a columnist for the "ECONOMIST" magazine.
There is a lot of good stuff in this magazine. It contains a lot of information from around the world, from politics, to the world economy, to science and art and literature. .
*******
Lexington
Donald Trump has not faced a challenge like fixing American health care before
No sales pitch can get around the fact that people either do or do not have health insurance
From the print edition | United States
Mar 16th 2017
ASK Washington grandees to explain President Donald Trump’s rise, and they often recommend reading “The Art of the Deal”. One piece of advice from that I-got-rich-quick book, published in 1987, is cited more than any other: Mr Trump’s boast that he built a property empire on “t***hful hyperbole”, playing on the public’s desire “to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular”. It is a striking passage to choose, but also a misleading one—implying that Trumpian success, in essence, rests on a talent for bamboozling rubes.
Actually, at the heart of “The Art of the Deal” lies a more subtle point about human nature: that some of the most profitable bargains are struck not with passive dupes, but with partners who are complicit in their own manipulation. A revealing episode describes Mr Trump tricking investors into thinking that a casino in Atlantic City is almost half-built by cramming the site with bulldozers under orders to look busy. Despite an awkward moment when an investor asks why one builder is refilling a hole that he has just dug, the gambit works. The investors had already been burned once by a project that ran over-budget so now needed a quick success, Mr Trump explains: “My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe.”
That variety of leverage has been key to Mr Trump’s success, in business and now in politics. He is an unusual sort of tycoon. He has no life-changing invention to his name. He did not build a globally significant corporation (worth about $4bn, the Trump Organisation would be America’s 833rd-largest firm if it were listed). Instead he turned himself into a brand. He is a salesman whose greatest product is himself, slapping his name on everything from skyscrapers to hotels, casinos, golf courses or the series of high-priced, hard-sell property seminars dubbed Trump University. He boasts of how many deals involve other people’s money, whether that involves picking up distressed assets for a song or luring gamblers to his casinos—“I’ve never gambled in my life,” he bragged back in 1987, adding: “I prefer to own slot machines. It’s a very good business being the house.”
Mr Trump’s business model offers him an unusual advantage. Whenever customers buy into his brand, they have a vested interest in his continued success. When buyers complain about corner-cutting in the construction of a Trump-branded apartment complex (“value engineering”, he calls such penny-pinching in “The Art of the Deal”), they harm the value of their own asset. Unhappy students of Trump University extracted $25m from the businessman, as he settled class-action lawsuits without admitting wrongdoing. Their satisfaction was hard-won: the world now knows their “qualifications” are worthless.
Mr Trump has worked to forge similar bonds of complicity with v**ers. His pledges to put America First, to deport “criminal aliens” or to bring back millions of manufacturing jobs make supporters feel empowered, heeded, safe and hopeful. Critics question such pledges at their peril: millions of Americans have invested a good deal in believing this president.
So much for Mr Trump’s success. Now, not two months into his presidency, he faces the hardest test of his political life to date, as he and Republicans in Congress wrangle over how to repeal and replace the Obamacare health law, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
On the campaign trail Mr Trump pledged to abolish what he called the “disaster” that is the ACA, and to “come up with a new plan that’s going to be better health care for more people at a lesser cost.” He promised to scrap things that the public dislikes about Obamacare, starting with its government mandate to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, while keeping things that are popular, such as protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
As a candidate Mr Trump proudly broke with Republican orthodoxy and said that—unlike other rival conservatives with White House ambitions—he would preserve “without cuts” the Medicare and Social Security safety-nets that mostly serve the elderly, as well as the Medicaid system of health insurance for the poor and disabled. The ACA offered federal funding to states that agreed to expand Medicaid, adding 12m people to its rolls.
Repeal, replace and reap what follows
On March 13th the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which “scores” new laws for probable costs and impacts, concluded that under an ACA replacement proposed by House Republicans, 14m more Americans will be uninsured in 2018 compared with current law, while by 2026 the ranks of those without health cover will swell by 24m as Medicaid is cut back. This will hit some core Trump supporters: the CBO estimates that while the young would gain from the Republican plan, those in their early 60s on low incomes, as well as rural folk, would see costs rocket.
Republican responses have been cacophonous. Party leaders like Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, defend the new health plan for cutting spending and call the cover offered by Medicaid so skimpy as to be worthless. Conservative House members call the new plan Obamacare-lite, saying its system of tax credits is too generous. Some Senate Republicans, especially those from states which expanded Medicaid, call the new plan too harsh. White House aides have rubbished the CBO and promise that Mr Trump’s dealmaking sk**ls will save the day.
But even for Americans predisposed to believe that Mr Trump is their champion and that his critics are lying, the question of whether they can or cannot afford health insurance is starkly binary. Being unable to buy treatment for a loved one is not empowering, it is frightening. Health care is an area in which v**ers have little incentive to forgive broken promises: even if their first instinct may be to blame those around the president, not Mr Trump. The president is in perilous territory. He needs a product that does an almost impossible job. Sales patter will not do.
There is a lot of good stuff in this magazine. It contains a lot of information from around the world, from politics, to the world economy, to science and art and literature. .
*******
Lexington
Donald Trump has not faced a challenge like fixing American health care before
No sales pitch can get around the fact that people either do or do not have health insurance
From the print edition | United States
Mar 16th 2017
ASK Washington grandees to explain President Donald Trump’s rise, and they often recommend reading “The Art of the Deal”. One piece of advice from that I-got-rich-quick book, published in 1987, is cited more than any other: Mr Trump’s boast that he built a property empire on “t***hful hyperbole”, playing on the public’s desire “to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular”. It is a striking passage to choose, but also a misleading one—implying that Trumpian success, in essence, rests on a talent for bamboozling rubes.
Actually, at the heart of “The Art of the Deal” lies a more subtle point about human nature: that some of the most profitable bargains are struck not with passive dupes, but with partners who are complicit in their own manipulation. A revealing episode describes Mr Trump tricking investors into thinking that a casino in Atlantic City is almost half-built by cramming the site with bulldozers under orders to look busy. Despite an awkward moment when an investor asks why one builder is refilling a hole that he has just dug, the gambit works. The investors had already been burned once by a project that ran over-budget so now needed a quick success, Mr Trump explains: “My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe.”
That variety of leverage has been key to Mr Trump’s success, in business and now in politics. He is an unusual sort of tycoon. He has no life-changing invention to his name. He did not build a globally significant corporation (worth about $4bn, the Trump Organisation would be America’s 833rd-largest firm if it were listed). Instead he turned himself into a brand. He is a salesman whose greatest product is himself, slapping his name on everything from skyscrapers to hotels, casinos, golf courses or the series of high-priced, hard-sell property seminars dubbed Trump University. He boasts of how many deals involve other people’s money, whether that involves picking up distressed assets for a song or luring gamblers to his casinos—“I’ve never gambled in my life,” he bragged back in 1987, adding: “I prefer to own slot machines. It’s a very good business being the house.”
Mr Trump’s business model offers him an unusual advantage. Whenever customers buy into his brand, they have a vested interest in his continued success. When buyers complain about corner-cutting in the construction of a Trump-branded apartment complex (“value engineering”, he calls such penny-pinching in “The Art of the Deal”), they harm the value of their own asset. Unhappy students of Trump University extracted $25m from the businessman, as he settled class-action lawsuits without admitting wrongdoing. Their satisfaction was hard-won: the world now knows their “qualifications” are worthless.
Mr Trump has worked to forge similar bonds of complicity with v**ers. His pledges to put America First, to deport “criminal aliens” or to bring back millions of manufacturing jobs make supporters feel empowered, heeded, safe and hopeful. Critics question such pledges at their peril: millions of Americans have invested a good deal in believing this president.
So much for Mr Trump’s success. Now, not two months into his presidency, he faces the hardest test of his political life to date, as he and Republicans in Congress wrangle over how to repeal and replace the Obamacare health law, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
On the campaign trail Mr Trump pledged to abolish what he called the “disaster” that is the ACA, and to “come up with a new plan that’s going to be better health care for more people at a lesser cost.” He promised to scrap things that the public dislikes about Obamacare, starting with its government mandate to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, while keeping things that are popular, such as protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
As a candidate Mr Trump proudly broke with Republican orthodoxy and said that—unlike other rival conservatives with White House ambitions—he would preserve “without cuts” the Medicare and Social Security safety-nets that mostly serve the elderly, as well as the Medicaid system of health insurance for the poor and disabled. The ACA offered federal funding to states that agreed to expand Medicaid, adding 12m people to its rolls.
Repeal, replace and reap what follows
On March 13th the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which “scores” new laws for probable costs and impacts, concluded that under an ACA replacement proposed by House Republicans, 14m more Americans will be uninsured in 2018 compared with current law, while by 2026 the ranks of those without health cover will swell by 24m as Medicaid is cut back. This will hit some core Trump supporters: the CBO estimates that while the young would gain from the Republican plan, those in their early 60s on low incomes, as well as rural folk, would see costs rocket.
Republican responses have been cacophonous. Party leaders like Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, defend the new health plan for cutting spending and call the cover offered by Medicaid so skimpy as to be worthless. Conservative House members call the new plan Obamacare-lite, saying its system of tax credits is too generous. Some Senate Republicans, especially those from states which expanded Medicaid, call the new plan too harsh. White House aides have rubbished the CBO and promise that Mr Trump’s dealmaking sk**ls will save the day.
But even for Americans predisposed to believe that Mr Trump is their champion and that his critics are lying, the question of whether they can or cannot afford health insurance is starkly binary. Being unable to buy treatment for a loved one is not empowering, it is frightening. Health care is an area in which v**ers have little incentive to forgive broken promises: even if their first instinct may be to blame those around the president, not Mr Trump. The president is in perilous territory. He needs a product that does an almost impossible job. Sales patter will not do.
Mar 22, 2017 12:02:24 #
Mar 22, 2017 12:31:49 #
Mar 22, 2017 17:09:59 #
Twardlow wrote:
Good Post....
Anything h**eful is a good post to you BOZO. When did you move here from the Soviet Union?
Mar 22, 2017 17:12:09 #
Twardlow wrote:
Good Post....
Great i***t. Nice that you acknowledge that it is a good post. The article acknowledges that our health insurance and health care are in a huge mess. That is because of your BOY obama of course.
Mar 22, 2017 17:20:28 #
idaholover wrote:
I loved the part where he tells everyone that your employer is going to save $3000.00 and he can give you a raise! Oh the jocularity!
Mar 22, 2017 21:41:08 #
hondo812 wrote:
I loved the part where he tells everyone that your employer is going to save $3000.00 and he can give you a raise! Oh the jocularity!
I loved the part in the article where the author said, "......Trumpian success, in essence, rests on a talent for bamboozling rubes."
Mar 22, 2017 21:51:14 #
Frosty wrote:
I loved the part in the article where the author said, "......Trumpian success, in essence, rests on a talent for bamboozling rubes."
Ya! Duh!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adrdmmh7bMo
Mar 23, 2017 07:08:10 #
FlyingTiger wrote:
Anything h**eful is a good post to you BOZO. When did you move here from the Soviet Union?
if he had ,he would be working in some capacity for Trump. Seems that he has an infatuation with them.
Mar 23, 2017 08:12:13 #
hondo812 wrote:
I loved the part where he tells everyone that your employer is going to save $3000.00 and he can give you a raise! Oh the jocularity!
Obama is our former president. This is in the past.
Trump is the president now and for sometime. In the future. He. Is who we should be concerned about not Obama. This article provides a good description of how he operates.
PBS did a documentary on Frontline comparing Hillary and trump. The part about Hillary doesn't matter now but the part about trump is relevant. The program provides some excellent insight as to his character, his marriages and his methodology. This article and the PBS program taken together provides a good overview of who we now have in the White House. These pieces may help his supporters understand why most of the people in this country are not as enamored with him as they are.
Here is a link to Frontline: "The Choice"
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365848966/
Mar 23, 2017 08:27:37 #
I am only speaking about the CBO. It;s a virtually useless organization. They got the ultimate cost of obamacare wrong by about 1 trilliion dollars. It amounts to a monstrous s**m in that it can only respond to the data it recieves, and makes no judgement on the accuracy of that data. It's pronouncements should be taken with a very large boulder of salt.
Mar 23, 2017 08:48:22 #
boberic wrote:
I am only speaking about the CBO. It;s a virtually useless organization. They got the ultimate cost of obamacare wrong by about 1 trilliion dollars. It amounts to a monstrous s**m in that it can only respond to the data it recieves, and makes no judgement on the accuracy of that data. It's pronouncements should be taken with a very large boulder of salt.
Would you kindly provide some sources or documentation?
Mar 23, 2017 10:07:12 #
Frosty wrote:
Obama is our former president. This is in the past... (show quote)
It's not in the past, it is the law of the land and it is k*****g the American dream and destroying middle class working families, especially the self employed who use to be the backbone of the economy.
Mar 23, 2017 10:08:48 #
Frosty wrote:
Obama is our former president. This is in the past... (show quote)
PBS is funded by the Deep State Obama shadow government that needs to be purged from our establishment.
Mar 23, 2017 10:09:45 #
Frosty wrote:
Obama is our former president. This is in the past... (show quote)
In other words, it's a hit piece from liberal hacks.
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