Like when Pelosi told her members not to have any more town halls after the reaction to ObamaCare in the summer of 2009? Or like how they passed it even though roughly three quarters of the people opposed it? Ok, so the government "listened" and 64 Democrats lost their seats in the House and 6 more in the Senate did, with exit polling showing that about half the country wants ObamaCare immediately repealed. Will it be? Nope, because Senate Democrats will block repeal and if it gets to Obama's desk, he'll veto it. Man that government is just so much better at listening to the people...

My dad is on Medicare and you'd be surprised just how little plain old Medicare* (A+B) covers. There's a reason why a lot of people seek Medicare Advantage plans, to get HMO-like coverage through a company rather than the standard service through CMS.

Part A gives and costs you (taken from 2011 Medicare and You booklet):
Blood: free from a blood bank. You pay for the first 3 units if the hospital has to buy blood
Home health care: $0 for services + 20% of equipment. However, the services you receive are limited and after 3 months, my dad was kicked off since it's not meant to be long term care
Hospital inpatient: $1132 deductible for the first 60 days, $283 for days 61-90, $566 for days 91+ (up to a total of 60 days in your lifetime which exceed 90 in a calendar year), + full costs after 90+lifetime reserve is exceeded. 190 days lifetime mental health.
Nursing home: $0 for first 20 days, $141.50 for days 21-100, full cost after 100.

Part B:
Blood: in addition to Part A, you now pay processing fees
Labs: free
Medical and other services: 20% of the Medicare approved fee for doctor services and outpatient therapy
Outpatient hospital services: copayment

To top all of that off, Medicare reimburses doctors for less than the actual costs incurred of many of their services, forcing private insurers and self-paying customers to make up the deficits created by serving Medicare patients.

Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it. See the numbers I posted here. Yes, the defense budget can be cut, but it pales in comparison to social spending at the federal level (1:3) and we spend even more on social programs on top of that at the state level. There's also that minor annoyance that national defense is a valid Constitutional function of the federal government while not one welfare program is (and yes, I know the "general welfare" argument quite well and it was absolutely destroyed in both the federalist and antifederalist papers).

Want the best in benefits/cost? Pay for your routine care out of pocket. I've spent a grand total of $115 in the last 5 years after I dropped by HMO (saving me roughly $30,000 in premiums). Buy catastrophic coverage to cover anything major (it's pretty cheap compared to full HMO/PPO care). You only pay for what you actually want and need, you get to shop around to any provider you want based on what you're looking for (want quality, look for quality, want low cost, look around, etc), you tend to get discounts compared to what others pay (my doctor visit was $60 total, compared to $15 copay + $120 or so that my dad's plan pays), etc.

By having a financial stake in your care, you get to decide what is most important to you... and most people (ie, those that aren't chronically ill) simply don't need to use medical services enough to make up for the premium costs - in fact, the entire insurance industry (not just medical, but life, fire, car, etc as well) is predicated on the very fact that most people will pay more than they get in return, the excess of which pays for those that pay less than they'll receive. By removing the association between the cost of medical care and its use, insurance perverts people's thinking so that they'll use their benefits excessively because "they paid for it anyway" which in turn, needlessly forces costs up for everyone else.

* Medicare A is strictly hospitalization and is all you get for "free" with the premiums you paid while working. Medicare B is doctor services and costs, for people making less than $85k a year, an additional $115.40 per month. That still leaves you without prescription coverage/Medicare D, which generally tends to cost more money on top of those. In my dad's case, he pays the $115.40 directly out of his SSDI check and an additional $101/month to an HMO Advantage plan, which covers prescriptions and a bunch of additional stuff.

Way to focus on one point and ignore everything else I said... Here's the original quote:

Now, admittedly, my mind had a disconnect there.. See, as you so obviously pointed out, the Bush tax cuts were in 2001 and 2003, so why would they be relevant to growth over the last 3 years? My mind went to the 2008 Bush stimulus check and the pay period pre-bate from Obama's stimulus plan since, you know, they were actually relevant to the last 3 years, while the 2001/2003 Bush tax cuts were as relevant to stimulating 2008-2009 growth as the JFK tax cuts from 1963/64 are. They are relevant to 2010/2011 growth due to their expiration.

This just in, I drank a lot of milk in 1978 so I'm not sure why I haven't grown taller in the last 3 years. Hey look, I can be snarky too.

Labor is a commodity just like any other resource... I can hire 4 people for my assembly line or I can hire a machine to replace them. A lot of those jobs that existed will never come back, just like they didn't come back in the buggy whip industry.

One of the good things about recessions, is it forces everyone to trim the dead weight - shedding people, processes, etc that they couldn't justify getting rid of before. After cutting back, they realize that those positions weren't necessary before or that there are more productive ways of replacing them, freeing up capital for new ideas. If you have no idea what your labor may ultimately cost you, it may very well make more sense to spend more up front on another means of production (robotic assembly, automated bakeries or foundries, even outsourcing to another country, etc) where your costs will be known.

Simple fact is, there are a lot of unknowns out there and, combined with an economy that, at a minimum, doesn't feel like it is recovering, few small business people (institutional investors are an entirely different gig, making money by jiggling existing assets, while new jobs are mostly created at the small business level) are going to want to risk an investment unless they absolutely have to.

You may want your tax money to go there, but what about those who don't? The federal government forcing it on everyone forces them to do it against their will exactly the same way that you're forced to pay for defense contractors, farm subsidies and corporate subsidies. Want to guess why we're so polarized as a nation? It's because we're using government to divide us. Everyone wants to use the government to impose their will on everyone else else... how about letting everyone have freedom and liberty instead?

That universal health care may or may not be around when you need it as well. Maybe you're outright denied - good luck appealing. Maybe you're put on a waiting list where things get worse and you become terminal or the proper fix becomes too expensive so they go for the quick and easy fix instead. Look at how the US government has managed the VA hospitals (Walter Reed anyone?) or the hospitals run through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Conservatives agree that our health care system needs fixing... what we don't agree with, is that the government is the solution to those problems. Allow people to buy across state lines, drop all the mandates that force people to buy cadillac plans or nothing, bring patients closer to the cost of their care (people will go to the doctor for a sniffle since it only costs them a $5 or 15 copay or they'll demand every test in the book since they don't even have to pay a copay to the lab), etc.

* The current situation we're in is BECAUSE of the constant interference of government. 100 years ago, if you got sick, the local doctor would make a house call and, for a small amount of money, maybe even a simple barter exchange, he would diagnose and treat you.
* As part of FDR's economic reforms, the NRA fixed wages. In an effort to retain good workers, businesses started offering health insurance as a means of skirting the wage freezes
* In 1963, as part of the Great Society, LBJ and the gang decided it wasn't fair that the working people got health insurance but the poor and elderly didn't, so Medicare and Medicaid were created
* In 1973, a freshman Teddy Kennedy realized that costs were growing out of control (in fact, Medicare and Medicaid far exceeded their cost projections) and that regular workers were getting left behind, so he wrote the Health Maintenance Organization Act, creating HMOs that were deeply regulated by the government, to encourage people to seek routine care to try to prevent future expenses
* In 2003, Bush and company created Medicare D because prescription drugs were getting too expensive for elderly without insurance after being driven up by HMOs used their clout to lower prices for themselves
* In 2010, Obama and friends gave us the clusterfuck that forces us to buy insurance, that we don't necessarily want, likely from a giant conglomerate that doesn't care about us, or be forced to pay a monetary penalty (hey, if I don't have insurance, maybe it's because I can't afford it in the first place, hence, where does the money for the penalty come from?). It's going to bring down costs by allowing people to not pay premiums until they need coverage, will give us universal healthcare by encouraging employers to drop existing coverage and forcing employees into pools they pay for themselves, etc.

Every time the government has gotten involved, things got worse. ObamaCare is the biggest clusterfuck of all of them but he HAD to get something through, anything, after making it his signature issue, lest it become his Waterloo.

Me? I just want government out of my health care and out of my life as much as reasonably possible.

Just to get it out of the way, I opposed Bush's stimulus checks as well. That said, tax cuts don't create budget deficits. That would require the assumption that the money belongs to the government in the first place while in reality, that money belonged to you all along. Deficits are created when the government actually SPENDS more money than it takes it and allowing you to keep more/taking less of what is yours has nothing to do with spending.

Correct... and the bar for just how many people you need to band together is found in Article V of the Constitution - two thirds of Congress (or state legislatures) and 75% of the states must ratify it. The federal government has no jurisdiction to even enter the health care debate, save to regulate the interstate effects of health care (that is, to say whether or not you can buy insurance across state lines and such).

If state governments want to enact universal health care, more power to them... but we should be VERY wary about forcing anything at the federal level. If I believe that a state abuses my rights, I have the freedom to move to a state more of my liking while still being ensured of my most basic rights under federal law. If the federal government becomes abusive, I have to forgo my entire way of life to move to another nation which will likely have values and protections far different from what the Constitution guarantees.

Um, the wiretaps are still ongoing and Obama became even more abusive about it, monitoring domestic-only calls even though Bush had not. He even wants to extend it to the internet. Ok, so it all just started under Bush, right? Well, let's not forget Project Echelon under Clinton, or, hell, go all the way back the McCarthy Era or even prohibition. The government has sure done a swell job of not violating the Fourth Amendment... and the easier it gets to tap into your personal data and communications, the more the government will do it, all while playing whack-a-mole when they get caught.

See, you mock me for spouting gibberish all while saying this... the very same government that constantly breaks its rules is suddenly going to honor its rules THIS time? That's exactly what I was trying to point out.

And who is it that regulates and runs the government? The politicians... Who is it that runs those evil corporations? They're equally evil CEOs. See, CEO evil bleeds over into the corporation, politician evil magically disappears in the government.

I'm all for participation in government... I'm pretty much against government participation in my life outside of a small role of protecting my rights since anarchy is bad. A government powerful enough to give you everything you wanted is powerful enough to take away everything you ever cared for or needed.

Hey, my used car salesman told me he was getting me a good deal too...

Here's what the Federal Reserve had to say in 2008:

I love this fallacy... America spent more on just bailouts than they did on all of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the "stimulus" package, QE2 or the fact that ObamaCare "breaks even" by paying 6 years worth of bills with 10 years worth of revenue and ignores the costs of the Doc Fix, which was deliberately excluded to try to hide the costs.

Here are the cumulative numbers for 2001-2010 (2010 estimated) from the OMB:

Military + Veterans benefits: $5,508,591
Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Income Security, Social Security: $16,041,184
Interest on Debt: $1,965,513

Now, I agree, there is a lot of room for cuts in the military and the wars hurt us financially... but it's laughable to pretend that the military is the primary source of our economic downfall. By the end of the decade, the amount of interest on the debt we pay annually will exceed the military budget (current White House estimate for 2015, farthest they list, shows a military budget of $685 billion compared to interest payments of $571 billion). Further, that is only federal spending - states spend almost nothing on their military (minor National Guard costs) and spend the vast majority of their budgets on social spending.

Where does the military budget go exactly? A good chunk goes to soldiers - many of whom spend their money in the US and the biggest chunk goes to defense contractors - many of whom employ primarily US workforces. Hey, isn't military spending just another form of stimulus? To quote Obama himself, "This is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point. No, seriously. That’s the point."

So were you for or against stimulus, I can't remember... I do know that with the current deficits making GWB look sane and a projection of interest payments growing out of control, we're in for some pretty deep problems down the road if we don't STOP recklessly spending across the board.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Care to actually debate anything I said or are you just going to attack the messenger? I have LOTS of problems with the Republicans... only, if you haven't noticed, they weren't the ones in power for the last two years and, in fact, I didn't even vote for their candidate in 2008 (I also wasn't stupid enough to vote for Obama).

I don't consider myself a full blown libertarian (taken to its extreme conclusion, you end up in a very bad place), but I am a conservative (and an atheist lest someone want to accuse me of being a bible thumper telling you who you can have sex with) with a libertarian streak running through me.

As I've said elsewhere, I used to manage restaurants for a long time and we hire a lot of kids (teenagers through college). I find kids tend to belong to one of two groups: A) "I can't believe they take taxes out of my pay! I worked hard for that money!" and B) "It's just beer/party/gas money anyway... my rent, tuition, etc are already taken care of (parents, loan, scholarships, whatever)" The latter group really doesn't care how much gets taken as long as they've got some spending cash because, at this point in their lives, everything IS pretty much free to them. Along with the permanent welfare class (and yes, there is a large permanent welfare class), they do see such things as free because they aren't thinking about where the money comes from since it has little to no immediate effect on themselves.

I'm not sure you were really listening... everyday people were complaining because it puts the government in charge of their healthcare, removing choices from themselves (yes, there are regulatory boards which will tell you whether or not you can have a procedure ala NICE in Britain), because it meant government controlling their most sensitive personal information, because it meant higher taxes, because it meant lower quality care for the majority of Americans that DO have decent insurance already, because it meant losing plans people already had (and despite the promises, people are already being told their plans will end because of it), because the problems could be solved in far less invasive ways, etc. You equate all of those things together, and yes, the problem is essentially socialism, but it wasn't the kneejerk "omg socialism" that lefties want to proclaim it was. People were informed and they didn't like what they saw and what we ended up with was probably the worst of all outcomes, with government interference benefiting crony capitalism.

And those nations that have figured it out have small, relatively homogenous populations with relatively high local population densities. The proper place for such activity, from a Constitutional perspective, from a quality perspective and from a responsible government perspective is to let the states implement their own policies if they want to. However, that isn't good enough for the statists since they want to bludgeon everyone with the same one size fits all club because it concentrates power into one place and allows them to abuse it. That's not to say your every day lefty who dreams of warm fuzzies expects the government to be abusive, it just means that they're naive about the ultimate outcome of what they advocate for.

Let the people govern themselves... that's not to say let anarchy reign supreme, but construct a government where, at the highest levels, it protects your most fundamental rights while staying out of your life as much as possible, and at the lower levels allow more involvement in day to day life because the smaller the government, the more responsive it is to its citizens. You know, kinda like what the Constitution says America is. Imagine that, a government actually of, by and for the people since it is kept close to those it is actually of, by and for.

Funny, as a former employer (I quit in part to take care of a disabled parent), I did have to consider the costs of hiring and retaining new employees. I managed restaurants for about 15 years and sales tax increases, minimum wage increases, changes in fuel and utility taxes, property tax rate increases, et al played into our hiring and expansion decisions. Expecting me to pay thousands of dollars extra to hire employee low skill/low wage workers causes at least one of two things to happen - an increase in prices (likely with a decrease in business) and/or less hiring (you make your existing staff work a little harder as you decide to let a little attrition occur to balance things out).

Now, it doesn't take a lot to understand this, you just have to be able to think. Is it worth hiring more staff to marginally expand your business (most businesses don't experience exponential growth) if the increased costs are going to cause unecessary risk? And how you do estimate that risk if you don't even know how much those new employees will ultimately cost you. So instead of building that ice cream take out window and hiring four people to man it, you forgo it, figuring those four people, with staff turnover rates and the potential increased expenses from having to pay for insurance for them, won't produce enough of a margin for you to bother investing in the first place. At best, you delay until you get more certainty, at worst, the plans are scrapped all together.

If you think uncertainty doesn't matter, go to your local bank and tell them you want to borrow money to start a business. You have no business plan, you don't have any clue of how much demand there is for your business, how much it'll cost to make your product to meet demand, what kind of profit margins you'll run or how long it'll take to pay back the loan, but hey, you're sure you'll be able to pay them back eventually so why wouldn't they invest in you?

Would you take out a loan if you didn't know what the interest rate was going to be?

To a business owner, someone who invests in their own business, uncertainty DOES matter. Only an idiot jumps in head first without checking to see just how deep the water is.

My numbers came from usdebtclock.org

The Times article you cite mentions the mythical "fund" that won't be exhausted until 2037. The 1967 amendment to the Social Security Act made it so that, any time Social Security ran a surplus, the money would go to the general fund in exchange for an IOU to be paid back later by Congress when Social Security was in deficit.

Those IOUs are what they're counting on as a "fund" and that money is flat out non-existent. The general fund is already running trillion+ dollar deficits without having to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund, meaning the money will either have to come from borrowing (sell more debt to China or to ourselves through the Fed), inflation (print more money to cover the deficit), taxation (which is likely to cause a revolt amongst working age people, especially younger ones, and will give them less money to prepare for their own future or current needs) or a reduction in payments (either through age increases, directly decreased payments, etc, which will likely cause a revolt amongst retirees and near retirees).

The "Greatest Generation" and the 1910s/30s/60s progressives sold today and tomorrow's generations down the river. We can only continue to ignore the reality of it for so long because it's going to come crashing down soon.

There's no such thing as free healthcare. Someone has to pay somewhere along the line...

Medicare... you mean the insurance that people were force to pay into for maybe 50 years prior to receiving it? I can't possibly see why people would want what they had already paid for, especially since, after paying those premiums, they couldn't have invested that money for their future needs, like health insurance, themselves. I'm young enough to know that I'll never get my Social Security or Medicare premiums back, so I'll gladly forgo my future entitlements if the government will let me opt out now.

Social Security is $14.7 trillion in debt (and already in the red despite the projections we wouldn't be for another 7 years), Medicare is $77.1 trillion in arrears and likewise Medicare D is $19.4 trillion in the hole. We don't have the money for the entitlements we already have (and the "lock box" is a box full of promissory notes that, one day, Congress will pay back the money from the general fund that they've been stealing since 1967 to hide the deficits created by the Great Society and Vietnam). The CBO scoring of Obamacare was deliberately skewed by the assumptions they had to abide by written into the law and it ignores that the Doctor Fix alone was enough to obliterate the fake "savings."

They weren't tax cuts, they were pre-bates. You save a couple bucks every paycheck, but you're still liable for the same tax amounts come April. Further, the pre-bates were so miniscule, they never created any emotional sense of tax savings. Stability is what produces jobs more than anything, and the Democrats decided to make healthcare their "one true issue" over the last two years, all while wavering on direct economic issues. They still have yet to pass a budget for the fiscal year that started a month+ ago, much less decide what the tax rate is going to be in 50ish days. Further, people STILL don't know everything that is in the healthcare law and that is STILL creating future uncertainty. It's pointless to hire and train new people today if you don't know if you'll be able to afford them in 6 months or a year.

Yes, like the notion that free health care can exist. Nothing the government does is for free, someone always is forced to pay one way or another.

Wait, is this the same government that you expect to be your sugar daddy savior? They'll sell you out left and right, but you're going to trust them THIS time, right? Further, they're evil and illegally wiretap you, but managing your health records is just fine. Here's a clue, government is force. Government is evil, a necessary evil, but still evil. Don't depend on it any more than you depend on the evil multinational corporation because, at best, you're one out of about 650,000 other voices that your Representative might decide to listen to and one of maybe 33 million your Senator will bother to hear from. The Federal government couldn't care less about you... you're a number at best. They are not benevolent and it is virtually impossible to fire them because even if you aren't in a gerrymandered district, the replacement is almost certain to be another member of the same party - the government party.

NY has more than half of its population on the dole or working for the state. It spends about twice per capita what California does and if you look outside the NYC/Albany/Hudson Valley area, you'll find PERMANENT unemployment in the 8-9% range. The papers upstate "brag" about how we avoided the latest recession by already being in a decades long recession. Yay us!

NYC didn't care until the recession hit Manhattan since they mentally block out the rest of the state as non-existent. We've got the highest property taxes, pretty high sales taxes (8%), income taxes, untold numbers of fees and whatnot... and with the exception of NYC (like Silicon Valley, it's a destination to go to since large numbers of workers with the target knowledge are available), the state is dead. Businesses routinely leave and unemployment would be higher if not for the fact that working class people eventually uproot their families and leave for another state to find a job. NY's population stays relatively flat because of the influx of immigrants, but its native families are forced to relocate, giving the southern states their population jumps.

You'll often find politicians crossing the aisle to vote with the other party much to the consternation of the party to which they belong. A lot of Democrats hate Joe Lieberman (to the point where they forced him out of the party) because he often sides with the Republicans on foreign affairs, though on most other isssues, he's a reliable vote for the Democrats. Likewise, despite his nomination in 2008 (which was an effect of early open primaries in large winner-take-all states), McCain is pretty well hated within the Republican Party for the same reason. Northeast Republicans, Blue Dog democrats, etc... really, there are a lot of people and subgroups that break away from their party quite frequently.

That said, the Republicans stayed pretty unified against the Democrats for the last two years precisely because they believed that the Democrats misunderstood the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections. By sticking with the party instead of crossing aisles (think Lindsay Graham abandoning his co-authored cap-and-trade bill), they strengthened their broader coalition going into this year. Graham almost certainly won't get cap-and-trade now, but he might be able to get something else he's in favor of for remaining loyal to the party. Of course, that's exactly how things get screwed up - you start making promises to bribe your more tepid members and pretty soon, you're abandoning your platform entirely (see Republicans and small government, Democrats and a single payer health care system, etc).

The problem is, for every thing they agreed with, there was something else they disagreed with... and by the time you included all the goodies that made everyone happy with something in the bill, most people were unhappy by the sweeteners added to make others happy. The surest way to anger everyone is to try to please everyone.

At the end of the day, the health care reform did nothing of what it ws originally supposed to do (bring down costs by covering everyone) and ended up raising costs for everyone, ensuring lots of people will refuse to insure themselves (why pay $15k a year if I can pay a $1k or so penalty and then wait until I get sick to buy insurance?), creating dozens of new bureaucracies, taking away insurance plans from those who already have them (people on Medicare Advantage, incentives for employers to DROP their employees insurance, etc). Frankly, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and they ruined the broth.

The Democrats knew people would hate a lot of provisions, which is why they staggered how the bill would be imposed on society. Some of the "good" stuff like coverage for "kids" up to 26 kicked in just before this year's elections, some of the negative effects like the penalties for not buying insurance magically don't kick in until after the next Presidential election so that Obama won't have to be held responsible for them. The whole thing was a game of politics.

Well, there's a difference between honestly soliciting the opinions of the other side so you can try to craft better legislation and then there's putting on a show, where you solicit their opinions but ignore them while simultaneously whining that they don't have any opinions to try to make them look bad because your own party won't sign onto the legislation you've written...

Perhaps the saddest part for the country at large, is that the Democrats became so wrapped up in trying to create a new entitlement to save face, they completely ignored other massive issues, which caused the economy to further languish. They didn't even bother to pass a budget for this year, despite the fiscal year starting weeks ago, again, fearing the backlash of admitting another year of $trillion+ deficits with virtually nothing to show for all the extra spending.

The Democrats weren't united in what they wanted themselves. The Bernie Sanders/Dennis Kucinich wanted full blown European style health care while the "Blue Dogs" wanted to tweak things, but didn't necessarily want to go to the extent of government controlled health care. So, the far left Dems went about watering down their ideas to please the Blue Dogs since they didn't have enough votes to pass it without them. At no point did the far left really care about what the Republicans wanted, they only wanted enough votes to pass it, which, with their large majorities, they could have done on their own (including in the Senate where, prior to Scott Brown's election to the former Kennedy seat, the Democrats had the super-majority needed to invoke cloture to stop a Republican filibuster. They would have loved to peel off a couple of the more liberal Republicans in an effort to call the legislation bi-partisan, but they knew they didn't need to and, in the end, they failed to do so.

At the time it passed, the Congressional Republicans were united against it and, more importantly, about 70% of Americans at large were against the legislation as well. Obama famously saw its failure as his Waterloo, however, and ordered Pelosi and Reid to pull out all measures to get it passed, insisting that once it was a done deal, people would appreciate it. They didn't and they still don't, with roughly half of the voters turning out yesterday saying they want the law fully repealed.

The truth is, America really is a many-party system but it is pre-built into two eternal coalitions. The Democrats go out of their way to focus on identity politics, talking about how they're the party that represents this special interest group and that special interest group. What most lefties fail to realize, however, is that the Republicans have a lot of constituencies within their tent as well, ranging from the social conservatives (who generally don't care one iota about huge government) to fiscal conservatives (who often don't care much about who you're sleeping with) to people of an even more libertarian bent and then people who might as well just be Democrats but they can't seem to give up the Republican label they inherited from their family.

Anyway, the Democrats don't care about pleasing Republicans, they just wanted the APPEARANCE of trying to please Republicans "in an effort to be bipartisan." As I said, over much of the last two years, the Republicans were completely powerless to stop anything that the Democrats wanted to do - the problem was that the more moderate Democrats didn't want to go along with the big ideas of the far left side of the party. For Democrat PR sake, they tried to dump their internal stalemates on the Republicans... all while not realizing that the population at large was against what the Democrats were imposing, or at least trying to, upon us.