Well I see you've found your cherry. Enjoy it. I'm not going to argue a whole lot because the cutting is not clearly detailed rather than explained as a lot of cuts in costs, (they're actually taking 17m more into medicare), etc etc, but cutting overall costs through the taxes and employer structure of insurance, and sure I'm completely in agreement that some people will probably lose coverage and others will gain. And I'm not going to argue that with you. Because, I'm honestly not knowledgeable in the area to deal with your vehemence.

What I do know is the difference between gross and net, and I also know that you've now twice thought that your source was telling you correctly.

"but if the gross cost has doubled then it's not exactly arguing about monsters in the shadows"

I'm not going to belabour the point. I can't stand the thought of raising your blood pressure another hair, lest my flesh be verbally ripped off my body.

What I mean is, 2014 will see the full implementation of the law, so 2014-2024 would be the first 11 years.

No... like the picture says the source is NES. I found it on Reddit and people over there fuss if the image isn't hosted on imgur. The information was taken from a book by Joseph Fried

NES=National Election Studies  paid for by the national science foundation 

You don't have to worry about that. If I'm pissed off, I'm pissed off that the Dems passed a bill that they couldn't explain because they hadn't even read it, that they advertised as costing far less than it actually does, and that hands control of a huge portion of the economy over to whoever happens to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services at the moment. Some anonymous person on a web forum attempting to carry water for those assholes doesn't really have the capacity to bother me.

"Anti-Intellectualism" could also be termed "Anti-Propaganda"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

Beyond this, mathematics is the language of the educated and intelligent and I refuse to call anyone who doesn't have a solid grounding in mathematics an "intellectual" so the vast majority of professors who have been educated in fluff do not have a right to claim "anti-intelectualism" when it is pointed out that all they teach is propaganda.

This is true, and pseudo-intellectualism is a greater affront to true intellectualism than anti-intellectualism could ever be.

This in itself could lead to a large array of various different discussions.

One point I will make. Many liberals on the left have a disdain for those that refer to themselves as "conservative", as well as Republicans. They see all "conservatives" as naive idiots that refuse to accept "facts" about how the world operates and certain topics that many universities teach such as in politics, and sciences. If you don't accept their world view then you are an outcast and branded as a "toothless" moron with "radical" views.

The fact is the current higher education institutions are filled with faculty having very "liberally biased" type views that are not in actuality based on facts. Many things taught in higher education teach that people labeled as "conservative" are intellectually stupid, or refuse to accept what they deem as "facts" when in reality they are just trying to push their world view of group think which is not based on "facts", but more on their own theories on how the world works.

You respond with an accusation of intellectual conspiracy, and an ill-informed one at that. All sciences need some grounding in statistics, and i can quite assure you that most everyone with a PhD is by necessity at least as good at statistics as you are. It's pretty much the only way to launch a defensible dissertation or to keep putting out research.

If there is propaganda in colleges i haven't seen it, and i've made it a point to pay attention to all my professors for biases in one direction or another, and while i have seen more liberals than conservatives, i've seen a fair few who were better at playing their beliefs closer to their chests, and never have i witnessed substantive distortion of the facts. Granted, anecdotal evidence on my end, but this returns to other ideas from my original topic: any institution the right sees as espousing the wrong kind of fact is inherently a liberal conspiracy: the ivory tower and the "Lame-stream media" being two of them. Once they are dismissed as liberal conspiracies, anything they say can be freely disacknowledged.

And it was not the point of my post to declare the left free from guilt in all cases on these matters. Aside from "9/11 was an inside job" i really don't remember much that was circulated about Bush that was factually false (likely by his own admission, he has a checkered past of fratboy antics).

The question of "intellectual overreach" is a considerable one, but i sure as hell would rather have someone learned fixing their own mistakes than someone blustering forward on mere "conviction." Smart people can make dumb decisions, but they are better-equipped to fix them. If you want someone who is going to exercise caution and restraint, you're not going to find it on the right as it is (perhaps in the libertarian movement, but i've noticed users around here have a hard time figuring out that the american right doesn't like libertarianism except where it suits them, which is again factual evidence presented by the fact that Ron Paul is currently fourth place to Newt frickin' Gingrich, but this is a rant aside).

There are even elements on the right who are openly yearning for the movement to shed the mantle of wilful ignorance. George Will's been reasonably vocal about it, which could be one of the reasons why he's one of the few conservative thinkers i respect, because he actually promotes thinking.

It's not a conspiracy. It's just that there's a preponderance of leftists in those institutions, so those institutions become functionally leftist ones. If a media organization is comprised of 90% liberals, they don't have to conspire in order to present a blinkered view of things. It will just naturally happen. When conservatives outnumber liberals in the general population, but only comprise something like 0.3% of sociologists (while liberals are grossly overrepresented) it doesn't take the fevered mind of a conspiracy theorist to think that the field is going to be heavily biased, and actually, it probably explains why studies on normal, white, middle Americans often read like anthropology reports on some pre-human hominid.

It seems like you're saying that smart people don't exist on the right, and Democrats govern with greater restraint than Republicans. That's pretty hilarious given the eerie similarities between the governance of the quintessential "smart Democrat" Obama and the equally emblematic "reckless cowboy Republican" Bush. Also, as a self-professed radical leftist with fascist tendencies (or whatever), don't you really not want caution and restraint? I mean, when Obama seized control of one-sixth of the U.S. economy you thought it wasn't enough because it wasn't a complete nationalization of health care.

And no shit that Republicans hate libertarians. Both parties buddy up to libertarians when they're out of power only to kick us in the balls when they're in. But the worst of the Republican agenda can't even hold a candle to the worst of the Democratic agenda, both because it's more narrowly focused and because it simply won't fly in today's society. People today wouldn't stand for something like the banning of contraceptives, and even as uncomfortable as many people are with abortion, I don't think they'd like an overturning of Roe vs. Wade much more. Meanwhile, it always seems to be the Democratic precincts that are trying to ban owning a goldfish or throwing footballs or salt. I really don't even think it's debatable who the bigger control freaks - and thus who the bigger enemies of liberty - are.

I'm well aware that there are intellectuals on the right (i did mention George Will, and acknowledged that, as far as credentials went, W had a veritable Brain Trust behind him as your article indicated), and i never maintained that i was wholly pleased with Obama, because he is functionally W. Bush II just with a more progressive outlook on certain issues, while setting dangerous precedents in other areas (and what the hell is with the backpedaling on medical marijuana?), and who has not been willing to push far enough, fast enough. This contraception thing is great, but reeks of election-year pandering.

In measured doses, more centralization and control does good things for a society, so long as this control does not undermine certain inalienable rights in the process, but the need for vigilence against overreach should not take the form of an entity whose rallying cry is "get yer guvmint hands off my medicare," nor an entity that enshrines avarice and believes in the inherent evil of the public sector. Accountability is important, but we shouldn't give in to the idea that we should restore a variant of anarchy just because it sounds easier than working to hold the government accountable.