Falling to the left...

A reader comments:

You seem to be sliding (falling) to the left. Are you celebrating the Health Care vote today? I suspect you are. Just tell all us ugly conservatives how we pay for it. [Source]

I hope I have never referred to conservatives as "ugly", but laying that aside, I assume the commenter is not aware that the HCR bill was scored as deficit-reducing.  Or in other words, it pays for itself and then some.

Now, we all know, the CBO projections are not iron-clad predictions of what will happen from now on, but these are the de facto rulings that both sides have used as impartial refereeing.

But I remain curious.  Where were all these "conservatives" when Medicare D was passed without funding?  When the Bush tax cuts adds trillions to the deficit after his term? And did the conservative hawks think wars were cheap? While current "conservatives" have tried to disavow their work of the past decade, they are greatly responsible for those deficits at least. So I ask them, how will they pay for their own promises?

Pseudo-conservatives today don't care about their own deficits, IMHO, they care about deficits that benefit others. I do care about deficits, except when the country is mired in recession, as I have posted. I have been detailing first where we can't solve the problem, and then I will start to address the substantive issues of deficit reduction.

It is all good fun to yell "liberal" to stall for time, but it wore off for me a long time ago.

Whatever.

I continue to oppose subsidies to farmers, ethanol, and other businesses that should be able to handle reality in the marketplace, like most already do.

I support efforts to control health care costs and redirect health care spending from the elderly (like me) to younger citizens. And yes, I am cheering the beginning of decoupling of employment with health insurance.  In fact, I will post more about some of the not-so-obvious ways this legislation could change farms and farmers.

I support free trade with all the pain it brings. (Yeah - I'm talking about sugar and ethanol and beef).

I support habeaus corpus, oppose torture and want to reinstate the draft. I want free speech and privacy respected.

And if wanting all Americans to have an equal chance for health care coverage, and being willing to pay for it with taxes on people like me makes me something other than a conservative, so be it.

I don't think of it as falling to the left, as much as climbing to the light.