Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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me time because it could be cruel to individuals in certain situations while still being the best solution for the greater good and the long term. And another way to look at this is the child view versus the adult view. The child view is I want candy. Well you know adult says you should have your dinner, there's a nutrition wall. Don't eat candy. And then the child will hear all those good reason…

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n investment. They're better off if the citizens have healthcare. And then you'd say the middle class, you're going to save more than you're gonna spend. Boom. That's it. That's it. You're gonna save more than you spend.

And if your company doesn't give you back a rebate for all the money they save, well they should. And then what about the stimulation, the stimulative effect? Bernie should be saying that if I could make all of these companies out there get rid of their healthcare costs it's like a gigantic tax cut. So in terms of the companies that are already paying for health insurance and wouldn't need to, it would be an enormous tax cut. Why doesn't Bernie say that it would be an enormous tax cut to companies that they would probably pass along to their employees because the employees would demand it? It wouldn't take long for them to demand it. The unions certainly would right away. Why doesn't Bernie sell it as a stimulation, as an economic stimulant?

Anyway my point is that everything he does about this is bad persuasion. And he's still doing great. Imagine if he started persuading correctly. He could probably take it all the way.

There's a story about the anti-Trump press is saying that Trump is creating lists of unloyal, disloyal people and so he can fire them. And I'm thinking to myself why is that a story? You know I think Trump was forced to take a lot of disloyal people on his staff because he didn't come to government with tons of connections and a network that he could just move in there and they're ready to go. I think he made a conscious decision to keep a lot of never-Trumpers just because they knew how to do the work. And now he's got some time to correct that. And so if he does, how could we complain about that? Every president has that right.

Let's see what else we got to go around here. Did you know that the Obamacare, the ACA, reached its highest favorability? This is funny. It's up to 55% favorable now. That's of course with the mandate gone, right? I'm right about that, right? The part that people hated the most was the mandate. And I thought that when the mandate was taken away that it was all supposed to fall apart because it required the mandate to work. But somehow it's still working. I don't quite understand why it's not ready to collapse, but I guess it's not.

And here I would like to give another periodic shout-out and compliment to President Obama. President Obama, who I've often said is a gifted persuader himself, he said out loud and in public that when Obamacare was being passed he actually said it's a bad plan but the real plan is to get the country a little bit pregnant. Meaning that once we had better healthcare we would never move backwards. We would have to fix it if it had flaws. He said that directly. He actually said in public, I'm gonna give you a bad plan because then your only choice will be to fix it. And it was the only way to get there. It was the only way to get there.

And I thought to myself that'

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s actually really smart. It's actually one of the best persuasion plays, maybe you could argue it's in the top three of all time. I mean it's just so brilliant it's invisible. I mean if I didn't mention it would you have ever heard that filter on it? If I hadn't said to you he intentionally and publicly said I'm gonna do this poorly and now you bastards are gonna have to fix it. He said that, not…

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