Liberals getting distracted...again

Remember what happened when Obamacare was being negotiated? Liberals got COMPLETELY distracted into thinking the only important provision was the public option. That's part of the reason so many people to this day don't know what was actually included in the legislation. As far as I see it - the public option was much less important than things like the largest Medicaid expansion in the program's history, or the medical loss ratios, or the exchanges, or the end of denials for pre-existing conditions, etc.

Today I see the exact same thing happening in that the only thing people are talking about when it comes to President Obama's budget is the fact that it contains use of chained-CPI. As I wrote about earlier today, when we actually see the details of the budget, what should become obvious is that there will be built-in measures to eliminate the impact this change has on those that are most vulnerable. With those provisions, a 0.3% annual reduction in the inflationary increase of payments is just not that big of a deal.

What I find baffling (and terribly disappointing) is that so little attention is being paid to the fact that President Obama's budget will also include implementation of his proposal for universal pre-K. To quote Vice President Biden..."this is a big fucking deal!" 

I'm struggling a bit to understand why the silence on this one. Perhaps it has to do with some liberal's addiction to howling about the negative rather than pushing for the positive. In my darker moments, I wonder whether or not they actually give a shit about children.

Let me remind you of a few facts:

• Looking solely at the federal budget, an elderly person receives close to seven federal dollars for every dollar received by a child.
• Today, 22% of children (16 million) live in poverty in the United States
• The longer a child lives in poverty, the tougher it can be for them to climb out later in life. According to an analysis by Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, 45 percent of people who spent at least half of their childhood in poverty were poor at age 35. Among those who spent less than half of their childhood in poverty, just 8 percent were poor at age 35.
• There are now seven million American children whose families earn below 50 percent of the poverty line. And in the last decade, we learned quite a lot about what it does to children to grow up surrounded by the kind of everyday chaos that often accompanies life in a family that is earning less than $11,000 a year. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists can now explain how early stress and trauma disrupt the healthy growth of the prefrontal cortex; how the absence of strong and supportive relationships with stable adults inhibits a child’s development of a crucial set of cognitive skills called executive functions.

For years now we've been hearing about how President Obama hasn't done enough to combat poverty. And yet here we have him proposing what might be one of the most effective anti-poverty initiatives in decades, and its being met with near total silence on the left.

I'm pretty pissed about all that. So you folks that are simply lighting your hair on fire about chained-CPI can go STFU as far as I'm concerned.