I’d been talking to Bobby, a late 60’s retiree on her porch; waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now it did.  She needed me to fix her property taxes.  Forget that Congress has nothing to do with this, that’s what she wanted. Still this would have been fine except for the reason she wanted the help.  She wanted it because “she was done paying for property taxes” now that she didn’t have any kids in school.

That kind of entitlement wasn’t the sort of thing I respond well to.  So yeah, I lost a voter.  Here’s how it went.

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Bobby gets rocked back on her heels when I explain to her why it is that Social Security earns a negative rate of return... and not just because of inflation. The fund loses money in real dollars. (07:05)

Bonus: I explain to you why everybody should be calling bullshit on the solutions both parties provide for social security. 

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Bobby was built like Tinkerbell’s grandmother but made from iron shavings and raw nerve.  I liked her immediately but I got the sense she was getting ready to club me in the head with a skillet.  Smart, uncompromising, and in command of her facts, this retiree wasn’t going to yield an inch; and she was ready to ask me what I was going to do for her.

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There's a lot of talk about unity and it's absence in our politics these days.  This podcast talks about the last time I saw us experience it.  Sadly, it wasn't a happy day.

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For a series of episodes you've been listening to stories about talking to tow voters at opposite sides of the healthcare debate.  Now I want to talk about what they have in common.  Fear.  A huge fear that after decades of not seeing the government act in their interests that a major change to healthcare is a bridge too far.  I lay out what they have in common and why that commonality is a big, big problem.

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This episode will aggravate some of you because this is where I see the left going off the rails. The left does a great job of seeing the reality of our collective need to change but it does a terrible job of getting back to first principles when looking for solutions. Here we have the continuation of a conversation with a well-intentioned candidate for office who has a blind devotion to a certain kind of healthcare reform.

Then I show up and point out the things that seem perfectly obvious.

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It had been years since that night talking to Ken at the town hall. My thinking on healthcare had evolved a great deal. Now I was running for office and it was time to test out some of that thinking with someone on the other end of the political divide.  I needed to challenge someone from the far left.  I needed someone so deeply committed to medicare-for-all that I knew any challenge to it would be seen as blasphemy.  Where to find such a person?  Luckily I was speaking at a rally on climate change.

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More and more we seem to understand one another less and less.  When I went to the Obamacare town hall back in 2009 I met Ken, who was not a fan of the ACA.  For two hours we stood on line next to one another and he never told me the truth about why he didn’t want the healthcare law to pass. It wasn’t until I saw him speak that night that I really understood what was going on with him.

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Ken had strong feelings about Obamacare. I couldn't have possibly expected him to know that I had just recently been wiped out becasue I didn't have healthcare at the wrong time.  I couldn't have expected him to know that I'd worked for years doing everything right, just to see it all slip away becasue it cost me so much to not lose my head (literally).  What I could expect from Ken was a better arguement than the one he broke down and shouted at me.

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In 2009 I went to a Congressional Town Hall on Obamacare. As crazy as the insurrection was a few weeks ago, this was very nearly that crazy.  It was where I came to a lot of formative thinking about the political climate we all live in today, becasue that was where a lot of our current fights started.

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