Christopher Galtenberg

"It has among the lowest tax burdens of any major country: fewer than 2 percent of the people pay any taxes. Government is limited, so that burdensome regulations never kill jobs. This society embraces traditional religious values and a conservative sensibility. Nobody minds school prayer, same-sex marriage isn’t imaginable, and criminals are never coddled." - Christopher Galtenberg

"The budget priority is a strong military, the nation’s most respected institution. When generals decide on a policy for, say, Afghanistan, politicians defer to them. Citizens are deeply patriotic, and nobody burns flags." - Christopher Galtenberg

"So what is this Republican Eden, this Utopia? Why, it’s Pakistan." - Christopher Galtenberg

"Why do people travel? Is it only, as Philip Larkin suggested, 'a deliberate step backwards' in order to create a new objective, namely homecoming?" - Christopher Galtenberg

"Despite its promotion into the serious league of literature, travel writing has remained something like the opera of letters: inherently bourgeois, faintly redolent of its imperialist past. The traveler here is emphatically not a tourist; he (usually not she) is a connoisseur of place whose aesthetic is other people’s lives. Contemporary travel writing still has the occasional reek of leather armchairs and gin, of old colonial maps." - Christopher Galtenberg

"I've predicted that lots of parts of Obamacare will not work the way they're expected to. But here's one I wouldn't have predicted: the high-risk pools, which were meant to tide people over until 2013, have signed up just 18,000 people as of March." - Christopher Galtenberg

"It was estimated by Medicare's Chief Actuary that around 400,000 would sign up (the CBO estimated 200,000, but only because they assumed that HHS would use its authority to limit enrollment in order to stay within the $5 billion budgeted for the program). So where are all the uninsurable people?" - Christopher Galtenberg

"The administration is now loosening the requirements (you just need a note from a doctor or nurse saying you've been sick in the last year) and lowering premiums. But this doesn't mean that they're finally covering more "uninsurables"; it just means they've decided to use the money allocated for those people to cover someone else. They're changing the "high-risk pools" to something that looks a lot more like simply subsidizing insurance. But the goal wasn't to spend the $5 billion that HHS got in its budget; the goal was to provide insurance for people who want to buy insurance, but can't find a company willing to write it." - Christopher Galtenberg

"DC seems to have forgotten *why* it is that deficits are a problem." - Christopher Galtenberg

"The reason is this. All else being equal, the more the government wants to borrow the higher, the interest rate it has to offer savers. And the higher the interest rate a saver can get from the government, the higher the rate he’ll demand from any other potential borrower. And those high borrowing costs end up depressing consumer purchasing and new business activity. An entrepreneur might have an idea that’s profitable at 6 percent interest but not profitable at 11 percent interest. If you push these things into the “not profitable” zone, then you have a problem." - Christopher Galtenberg

"This is why we had substantial deficit cutting deals early in the Reagan administration, midway through the GHW Bush administration, and early in the Clinton administration. Interest rates were high and spiking, the threat of crowding out was real." - Christopher Galtenberg

"But today? Really? It might be in some sense preferable to have a long-term budget deal in place. But it’s hard to say in what concrete ways this would improve any current problems. We’re just not—not—suffering from unusually high interest rates and crowding out." - Christopher Galtenberg

"HALF of all health care costs in the US is concentrated in only 5% of the population, and 80% of costs are accounted for by the top quintile!" - Christopher Galtenberg

"So the effect here is that with such a concentration of costs in such a small segment of the population, the ability of the larger population to move the market is highly restricted. You can make 80% of consumers highly price sensitive, but they can only affect a tiny fraction of healthcare spending." - Christopher Galtenberg

"Conversely, those who are high consumers of health care simply cannot be made more price sensitive, since their costs are probably well beyond what they could pay in any event, and for most are well beyond the limits of even a catastrophic health insurance policy." - Christopher Galtenberg

Follow-on: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011... - Christopher Galtenberg

"As the 10th anniversary of what Americans once called their Global War on Terror approaches, a plausible, realistic blueprint for bringing that enterprise to a conclusion does not exist." - Christopher Galtenberg

The neocons have taken our eye so far off the ball that it's scary. It's almost like they are an enemy within the gates. - Sean McBride

Just gave up every other dessert on earth. (For tonight.) - Christopher Galtenberg

"This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree. Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured." - Christopher Galtenberg

"The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself." - Christopher Galtenberg