Obama isn't able to beef up much with Congress voting on the laws first. That might prove difficult given the current makeup of Congress.
The best argument I've heard, that I agree with in a way, is that we should first focus on fixing our broken pre-college school system. I don't see why we couldn't do both at the same time but if we're forced to pick one or the other I'd agree that that is probably of greater importance. Though that's a separate debate :)
Just remember that I don't have kids in school nor in college, and taking my money to pay for more unfireable teachers is not "fixing".
I could also argue that if 4 year colleges have even in part become so expensive because of all the subsidized money available that bringing subsidized money to the community college will have an "unexpected result" so expected that one could hardly call it "unexpected" anymore.
Why else would he be floating proposals he knows can never pass, except to be winning cheap gains from the suckers who don't see it for what it is? A president proposing a huge program like free college for everyone without controlling Congress is basically talking to a wall.
Obama is trying to help the Democratic party with its stagnant voter base problem. The people who would regularly vote Democrat have moved far to the left of the Democratic mainline and are tired of seeing nothing come out of the Democratic party, meaning that they no longer have any motivation to vote for Democrats-- not to say they are voting for Republicans either.
Sure, you're going to say Obamacare came out of the Democracts-- but the left leaning segment of the Democratic base didn't want Obamacare, they wanted single payer, and Obamacare fell horrendously short of that. This election was a wakeup call for the Democrats, and indicated to them that they have lost their base to the more radical members of their party like Elizabeth Warren.
Thus, we see the Democrats attempt to show people that they still have big ideas, because they are incapable of showing people that they have big actions.
But good legislation does not just magically appear in Congress. Many government programs got a big boost from the President "calling for them"--national parks, for example, or the moon landings. These were not new ideas when Roosevelt or Kennedy spoke about them, but speaking about them helped generate the public momentum for Congress to act.
The U.S. was the first nation in the world to provide free, publicly funded education through high school. It was implemented locally, but it was an idea that was discussed and promoted nationally. The idea of free education is a powerful one in the U.S. culture.
And many community colleges are already heavily funded by state and local governments; making them totally free might not be as big a step as it seems on paper.
Policy change can be sudden and radical, but durable shifts in political priorities often start with legislative proposals, which build support for the idea in the public consciousness, which translate into pressure on elected politicians, which turn into policies -- maybe not this year, and maybe not until after several election cycles.
But if you never propose anything that won't pass today, you never move things in the direction you prefer.
I think we've entered the age where we can no longer ignore our national IT infrastructure shortcomings. As someone who has had more than a few sysadmin jobs, and at a couple places you've heard of, its incredible how little security matters, how poorly software is written, how few developers can write secure code, and how management can force IT to make boneheaded implementations that bite everyone in the ass later.
I would love to see a HIPAA-type regulation for all businesses, encryption everywhere, force change of default credentials, etc. The wild west days of the internet need to come to an end.
I'd rather not be subjected to (and pay for) more security theater, or see every small business out there drown in a paper mill suitable for the fortune 500s.
We are already liable for any gross misconduct.
Do you honestly think the EU privacy laws that we don't have in the US aren't doing anything?
Its incredible how the anti-regulation types think everything is fine and that no regulation has ever worked.
Regulation is a weapon to be used by powerful interests to bash competitors. For example, utilities love regulation as it gives them a de-factor monopoly and predictable income.
The medical industry widely ignores HIPAA in a holistic way. Ask any practice you visit about their handling of medical records, IT security practices, etc. Heck, ask them if they still use Windows XP.
This is kind of nonsense argument, because most utilities are monopolies by design. The idea is to give utilities a predictable income stream in return for agreeing to abide by certain public interest policies.
Models of efficiency, they are not, to the point that their inefficiency severely hinders their ability to serve "the public interest." They also tend to use their size to squash any potential competitors in their space (see power companies with private solar and the telecom industry versus VOIP).
Again, that's by design. The public authority sets rates at some fixed cost plus reasonable rate of return on capital. The idea is to encourage potentially very expensive capital investment without the perceived danger of subjecting a critical utility to the ups and downs of market pricing.
And utilities act to squash competitors because lack of competition is the whole quid-pro-quo of being a utility. Utilities don't make Twitter-like 30% margins with double-digit growth. The reason private capital is willing to sink money into them is that they get their consistent 10-15% return on a regular basis. Competitors not only upset the arrangement, they can quickly jeopardize that margin.
I'm not defending regulated utilities. I think they're mostly a bad idea, but judging by the discussions around here where people talk about the wonderfulness of water utilities, lots of people are on board with sanctioned monopolies with guaranteed rates of return. But the flaws you're pointing to aren't "abuses of regulation"--they're a conscious bargain between municipalities and utilities.
Quite possibly; the privacy and security portions of HIPAA were included to mitigate the risks associated with the push for electronic systems and standardized data that were more central to HIPAA -- and the enhanced privacy and security features added later in amendments to HIPAA were furthering that in the context of increased standardization and automation that was being promoted in the same legislation; without HIPAA, you might not have as much formal protection of patient data, but you also might have a lot less data in forms that were easy to compromise en masse in the first place.
(Of course, that would also have consequences for administrative efficiency and quality of care, and without HIPAA and the related subsequent acts that included those patient protections as mitigations to potential negative effects of their primary functions, the US might have the least efficient health care system in the developed world by an even larger margin than it currently does, which, even if HIPAA does net some increased risk to patient information, might not be worth the cost.)
One of the sources of a push for federal standards is frustration with multiple conflicting state standards doing the same thing.
If sweeping regulations do come along, I hope there's a strong push for them to be loose or amiable enough to avoid these problems. For now, though, I'm skeptical.