Saturday, October 31, 2009

In Case You Need More on Copenhagen...

Gullible eager-beaver planet savers - Mark Steyn - Macleans.ca: "I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means. Tim Flannery, the jet-setting doomsaying global warm-monger from down under, was in Ottawa the other day promoting his latest eco-tract, and offered a few thoughts on “Copenhagen”—which is transnational-speak for December’s UN Convention on Climate Change. “We all too often mistake the nature of those negotiations in Copenhagen,” remarked professor Flannery. “We think of them as being concerned with some sort of environmental treaty. That is far from the case. The negotiations now ongoing toward the Copenhagen agreement are in effect diplomacy at the most profound global level. They deal with every aspect of our life and they will influence every aspect of our life, our economy, our society.”"

...“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You float a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you.

...At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way.
As usual, Mark Steyn's entire column is both entertaining and enlightening. Read it and weep.

The RINO is out!

Republican Scozzafava Drops Out of New York Congressional Race - FOXNews.com: "Republican state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava has suspended her campaign for upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District seat, giving a possible boost to Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman against Democrat Bill Owens, Fox News has confirmed.

The move comes on the heels of a new poll that showed Scozzafava had fallen behind her two competitors in a close race.

The special election is Tuesday, and political analysts believe upstate New York could be a preview of congressional races nationwide in 2010 and 2012 as Republican leaders struggle to rebuild, redefine and regain control of Washington."


Take that Newt. We don't have to settle for RINOs. Only by running principled conservatives like Hoffman can the GOP take back the House in 2010.



Sign Up to Oppose "Carbon Reparations" and Violation of US Sovereignty

Unfortunately, with the current administration in power, it is necessary to go on the record for positions that used to be obvious:

1) The US should not cripple its own economy to fight fictitious global warming, particularly when giants like China and India have no intention of playing along (a position affirmed 95 - 0 by the Senate when presented with the Kyoto Treaty)

2) The US must not and cannot cede its sovereignty to any world body for any reason

3) US citizens must not ever be made liable to pay taxes to any world body, for any reason

All of the above are currently contemplated by the Copenhagen treaty

Follow the link above to take a stand against this monstrosity.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Inescapable Allure of the Public Option

As we near the finish line on health care "reform" legislation, the Dems are converging on various flavors of "public option." The pundits are all weighing in on the political considerations driving this move (mollify the MoveOn wing of the party), and no doubt that has its role. But the real reason it has come down to the public option is that the public option is the only type of plan that Congress can rig to appear as if it is saving the taxpayer money. Only in a public option can Congress get the CBO to score fictitious savings that are written into law by fiat. For example, legislating a schedule of reimbursement decreases to health providers year after and then counting those "savings" as offsetting the massive costs of their plans.

I think almost all Americans know that such savings will never materialize. And in case anyone had any doubts just look at the "Doc Fix" bill that went down to defeat last week. The Doc Fix bill was a brazen attempt by the Dems to buy off doctors by cancelling out years of legislated reductions (aka "savings" of $250B) in payments to health providers. Year after year, Congress backs out the phony savings promised when they passed the bill, under pressure from reality as well as from special interests:
"Since its enactment in 1997 the so-called 'sustainable growth rate' mechanism [aka "savings'], which uses a complex formula to establishes annual target costs for physicians' services under Medicare, has not kept up with actual costs.

That's required Congress to step in almost annually with one-year fixes to prevent doctors from facing ever-bigger potential cuts in payment rates. The cut that loomed for doctors in 2010 was 21 percent. Without a permanent redo of the payment formula, Congress would presumably have had to continue to do one-year fixes, something that would also have cost money and that doctors hated because of the uncertainty involved."

Rural legislators hated these legislated "savings" because it had the effect of greatly diminishing the supply of and access to quality health care in their rural districts.

For the "savings" to ever become real would require Congress and the President, year after year, to have the discipline and the integrity to follow through with the painful choices that need to be made, and resist the temptation to cave to special interests or to buy votes by reneging on their responsibilities. The sad history of our Congress clearly argues against our ever seeing any savings.

The Congress is not serious about fiscal responsibilities. It is telling you so by cancelling out Medicare "savings" at the same time it is telling you its new health care plan will be paid for through "savings" in Medicare. And the President is going along with this charade, all the while accusing his opponents of intellectual dishonesty. How stupid do they think we are?

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Great News! Taxpayer RIghts in Blue State America

..."voters in two liberal states on opposite ends of the country will also take up measures to limit spending. The outcomes will give us a clear sense of the public mood toward runaway spending.

Maine and Washington are both more liberal and secular than the rest of the country. Barack Obama carried each state with identical 17-point margins, and both have powerful public employee unions that have driven up the cost of government to the point that a backlash has developed." ...

"A similar law, the 'Gann Limit,' passed in California in 1979. It helped keep the Golden State's balance sheet stable until 1990. Then Republican Gov. George Deukmejian teamed up with public employee unions to convince 52% of voters to fund a transportation spending package that slyly rewrote the spending limits, effectively emasculating them. Voters were left with the illusion that they still had a curb on spending when they didn't. California has since experienced three state budget crises as runaway spending combined with volatile revenues left it with junk-bond ratings on its debt and enormous future pension and benefits obligations. With a real Gann Limit, its budget would be balanced now.

If voters in Maine or Washington state pass a taxpayer bill of rights, it will be a clear sign that even in blue states the public is coming to believe that government spending is out of control and that elected officials can no longer be trusted to rein it in. That's a message that will likely reverberate in Congress regardless of who wins in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races."
Deficit spending/public sector debt is the Holy Grail of issues for conservatives. We must put forward fiscally conservative candidates who can articulate the small government philosophy of the Founders, and who will stand firm against growth in government spending. If we do, we will win.




Saturday, October 10, 2009

Mark Steyn on The Nobel Prize Winning Presdient of the World

Investors.com - No Laughing Matter: "Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?"

...Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy — for America and the world.


Now that the world has a President, when will America get one?


Thursday, October 1, 2009

We Should Be Beating the Drum To Stop the Stimulus

Robert J. Barro: Stimulus Spending Doesn't Work - WSJ.com: "The bottom line is this: The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. Defense-spending multipliers exceeding one likely apply only at very high unemployment rates, and nondefense multipliers are probably smaller. However, there is empirical support for the proposition that tax rate reductions will increase real GDP.

Mr. Barro is a professor of economics at Harvard. Mr. Redlick is a recent Harvard graduate. This op-ed is based on a working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September."

I believe that public disgust and anger over the $800B stimulus is largely responsible for saving us from ObamaCare. The President really shot himself in the foot backing that boondoggle. If he were as smart as people say he is, he'd call for the unspent stimulus dollars to be canceled. We all know they are not stimulating the economy. This research only confirms what we already knew. Canceling stimulus spending is the right thing to do and a political winner.





I Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

Holman Jenkins: Why Obama Bombed on Health Care - WSJ.com: "The public is not as dumb as it's made out to be, and Mr. Obama's public option died a bipartisan death yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee. What's left is a package of 'reforms' that are mere trite extensions of what we've been doing for decades. That is, piling up mandates on private insurers and then lying that this somehow isn't driving up the cost of health insurance; piling up subsidies for health consumption and then lying that this somehow isn't responsible for runaway health-care spending."


Well said. Of course, I won't consider the public option dead until co-ops are also off the table.



Monday, September 21, 2009

Administration's Honduras Position is Bogus Says Independent CRS

Mary O’Grady: Hillary’s Honduras Obsession - WSJ.com: "Now a report filed at the Library of Congress by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) provides what the administration has not offered, a serious legal review of the facts. 'Available sources indicate that the judicial and legislative branches applied constitutional and statutory law in the case against President Zalaya in a manner that was judged by the Honduran authorities from both branches of the government to be in accordance with the Honduran legal system,' writes CRS senior foreign law specialist Norma C. Gutierrez in her report."

The shocking fact is that while thugs like Achmadinijead and Chavez are welcome at the UN, the leftists of the Obama administration are preventing the legitimate interim president of Honduras from entering the US. This report should remove all pretense of legitimacy from this shocking policy.



Powerful Parable

PatriotPost.US: "Many years ago, as a small child, I was told one of those old-fashioned fables for children. It was about a dog with a bone in his mouth, who was walking on a log across a stream.

The dog looked down into the water and saw his reflection. He thought it was another dog with a bone in his mouth-- and it seemed to him that the other dog's bone was bigger than his. He decided that he was going to take the other dog's bone away and opened his mouth to attack. The result was that his own bone fell into the water and was lost...

..the passing years and decades have made me ralize how important that story was, because it was not really about dogs but about people.

Today we are living in a time when the President of the United States is telling us that he is going to help us take that other dog's bone away-- and the end result is likely to be very much like what it was in that children's fable.

Whether we are supposed to take that bone away from the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies or the insurance companies, the net result is likely to be the same-- most of us will end up with worse medical care than we have available today. We will have opened our mouth and dropped a very big bone into the water."


Thomas Sowell is a great thinker and renowned economist. He could throw around the economic and health care jargon with the best of them. But with this simple fable, he has made one of the most compelling arguments I have read for opposing ObamaCare. I recommend reading the whole column.

Hat tip to Horendo for bringing this one to my attention.









Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Where's the Fact Check Czar When You Need Him?

President Obama is Wrong About Insurance Costs - WSJ.com: "Speaking of health-care distortions, as President Obama likes to do, consider his assertion to Congress that 'buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.' He liked that one so much that he repeated it over the weekend in Minneapolis, this time as a swipe at 'the marketplace.'

The media's 'fact-check' brigade hasn't noticed, but this is simply false. The Congressional Budget Office expects premiums for employer-sponsored coverage to cost about $5,000 for singles and $13,000 for families this year on average. 'Premiums for policies purchased in the individual market,' adds CBO, 'are much lower about one-third lower for single coverage and half that level for family policies.'"


The President continues to cite bogus "facts and figures" to support his health care. This one is so obvious. Of course individual coverage is cheaper, because INDIVIDUALS are scrutinizing the costs and the benefits, because it is THEIR money. We need to harness the power of millions of American consumers, scrutinizing their health care costs, to bring down the cost of health care. This is the essence of every conservative proposal for health care insurance reform. Virtually every leftist proposal undermines the power of the consumer to bring control to health care costs. That's why no matter how any of the leftist health bills are scored today, all of them promise runaway health care spending for the future.



Monday, September 14, 2009

The President Should Appoint Another CZAR - the Fact Check Czar

Scott Harrington: Fact-Checking the President on Health Insurance - WSJ.com: "To highlight abusive practices, Mr. Obama referred to an Illinois man who 'lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about.' The president continued: 'They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.'

Although the president has used this example previously, his conclusion is contradicted by the transcript of a June 16 hearing on industry practices before the Subcommittee of Oversight and Investigation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The deceased's sister testified that the insurer reinstated her brother's coverage following intervention by the Illinois Attorney General's Office. She testified that her brother received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week 'window of opportunity' from 'one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine,' that the procedure 'was extremely successful,' and that 'it extended his life nearly three and a half years.'"


This column is well worth reading. The President, while essentially calling his opponents liars, is going around repeatedly citing bogus statistics and examples to support his health plan. This cites two anecdotes the President uses, as well as his attack on Alabama insurers, which range from highly suspect to completely wrong. You'd think with so many new positions created in the White House, they could find someone to check their facts.


Friday, September 11, 2009

The Joe Wilson Affair - A "Teachable Moment" Squandered

The mainstream media coverage of Congressman Joe Wilson's audacious "speak truth to power" moment in the joint session of Congress on Wednesday predictable avoids the real issues at hand:

1) Mr. Wilson is right - the President's speech was a litany of falsehoods and half-truths.
2) Mr. Wilson was only screaming from the frustration of being subjected to yet another high profile speech that served up all the same, discredited Democrat talking points, instead of the President answering the concerns of tens of millions of Americans about this plan - which was how the speech was billed by administration
3) How else are Republicans to be given a chance to debate this plan - they have been virtually shut out from any meaningful debate in Congress over where we should take our health care system in the future. Would you have ever heard about Joe Wilson's point of view if he hadn't shouted out of turn in the House chamber the other night?

Mr. Wilson should have offered a conditional apology: "I will apologize for my outburst when the President offers some concrete evidence in any of the pending legislation for his claim that these health care benefits will not be extended to illegal aliens." If you don't know the background, Mr. Wilson was a supporter of two amendments offered up in the House that would have required the Democrats to do just that, and both were soundly defeated. For some reason, the Democrats, who have generated thousands of pages of law on this topic, are unwilling to commit to paper the rules and procedures designed to ensure illegal aliens do not abuse our health care system.


Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Tell Your Government Health Care Buddies To Watch This Video

John Stossel does a terrific job of exposing the failings of government-run health care. Click the link above and enjoy...

Friday, September 4, 2009

The Ghost of Health Care Future

'Cruel and neglectful' care of one million NHS patients exposed - Telegraph: "One million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain, according to a major report released today."

What we have to look forward to when our health care is run by NICE guys in the government. Read the story.



They Don't Have DEATH PANELS in Britain Either...

Sentenced to death on the NHS - Telegraph: "In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states."


The fact that the words "death panels" don't appear in the legislation doesn't mean that's not where we are heading.


Stop Bullying Honduras

Stop Bullying Honduras by The Editors on National Review Online: "As for the Obama administration, its mistreatment of the interim Honduran government is an ongoing travesty. In removing Zelaya from office, Honduran officials took a legal, constitutionally authorized stand against Chávez-style authoritarianism. They deserve praise, not punishment."


The leftists in the Obama administration are turning up the heat on Honduras to return their Chavez wanna-be deposed President to power. I suggest you let your Congressional delegation know that you are embarassed to find the US on the side of a political thug and against the constitutionally legitimate government of Honduras.



Did You Feel John Murtha's Hand Reaching Into Your Pocket?

Tyler Grimm: John Murtha’s Airport and Other Wasteful Earmarks - WSJ.com: "In 20 years, Mr. Murtha has successfully doled out more than $150 million of federal payments to what is now being called the airport for no one...

There are a total of 18 flights per week, all of which go to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C...

The airport has an $8.5 million, taxpayer-funded radar system that has never been used. The runway was paved with reinforced concrete at a cost of more than $17 million. The latest investment was $800,000 from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to repave half of the secondary runway. (Never mind that the first one is hardly ever in use.)"
Whether you felt it or not, John Murtha reached into your wallet and removed $1 from you and every taxpaying American for his empty airport in Johnstown. Now, if John Murtha's airport were the only pork barrel project in DC I'd say, "so what?" But this is just one of many of Murtha's projects, and he is but one of the herds of swine that feed at the federal trough. I don't know about you, but this makes my blood boil. Thank goodness Barack Obama is putting an end to all this.



Afghanistan Isn't Obama's War

Dan Senor and Peter Wehner: Afghanistan Is Not ‘Obama’s War’ - WSJ.com: "We do believe, however, that Republicans should resist the reflex that all opposition parties have, which is to oppose the stands of a president of the other party because he is a member of the other party. In this instance, President Obama has acted in a way that advances America's national security interests and its deepest values. Republicans should say so. As things become even more difficult in Central Asia, it's important to keep bad political patterns we have seen before from re-emerging."


I agree. My inclinination to agree with George Will's recent column is not about wanting to hand the President a political defeat. I don't care whose war it is. And Afghanistan is an easy one politically, since everyone professed support for it. So we don't need to engage in finger-pointing. My opinion is based more upon the fact that the scope and duration of effort required to prevail in Afghanistan appears to be much greater than what was/is required in Iraq. I find it exceedingly hard to imagine that the candidate who got his opening by harnessing the anti-war left is going to emerge as the leader who convinces the American public to hang in there for a long, bloody, expensive war in Afghanistan. I find it hard to believe that the candidate that never acknowledges the cost of his policies is going to be willing to set proper expectations for the effort in Afghanistan. If President Obama leads his team to develop a clear and consistent strategy for victory, and he lays out on the table for the American people what it is going to take to win, then I'll consider that I was mistaken, and that we should support the President's desire to fight on in Afghanistan.



Revenge of the Doctors - Nationalized Legal Care

Richard B. Rafal: A Doctor’s Plan for Legal Industry Reform - WSJ.com: "• Legal 'death panels.' Over 75? You will not be entitled to legal care for any matter. Why waste money on those who are only going to die soon? We can decrease utilization, save money and unclog the courts simultaneously. Grandma, you're on your own.

• Ration legal care. One may need to wait months to consult an attorney. Despite a perceived legal need, physician review panels or government bureaucrats may deem advice unnecessary. Possibly one may not get representation before court dates or deadlines. But that' s tough: What do you want for 'free'?

• Physician controlled legal review. This is potentially the most exciting reform, with doctors leading committees for determining the necessity of all legal procedures and the fairness of attorney fees. What a wonderful way for doctors to get even with the sharks attempting to eviscerate the practice of medicine."


Here's one sector of the economy I'd like to see big government "reform." It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.



Tuesday, September 1, 2009

I'm Afraid He's Right

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Knowing When To Cut Forces In Afghanistan: "instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters."


I'd be very skeptical of the Afghanistan effort at this point if we had a hawk in the White House. How long could he keep an impatient American electorate behind the effort? But with a leftist President, beholden to MoveOn.org, I really worry that, as George Will argues, the will to see this thing through is clearly not going to be there long term. And it's obvious our vaunted allies are not committed for the long haul. Let's face reality now, and come up with an alternative plan to maximize the disprution of Al Qaeda operations in the region and minimizes Al Qaeda and Taliban interference in Pakistan.



Obama Curbs Federal Pay Increases - WSJ.com

Obama Curbs Federal Pay Increases - WSJ.com: "White House officials say the declaration was routine. Ever since Congress passed the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act in 1990, presidents have been invoking the emergency clause to hold down pay increases due under the formula that mandates wages comparable to local pay levels.

That has created a yawning gulf. If Mr. Obama did nothing, the comparability formula would dictate a 16.5% pay increase, on top of the 2.4% cost of living increase.

That would be a $22.6 billion hit to the ailing federal budget in 2010. Cost of living adjustments alone were to boost pay by 2.4% for most federal employees."


Who in the private sector is getting a 2.4% COLA on their pay in 2009, much less a 16.5% "comparaility raise?" I'll tell you how to make sure public sector pay is in line with the private sector. Stop giving them raises. When they start leaving in droves (which will happen right after hell freezes over), then start giving them "comparability" raises and COLAs. We need to get public employees payrolls under control. This is ridiculous. And don't get me started on pensions and benefits.



Saturday, August 29, 2009

Fire Holder

Newt Gingrich: President Obama should fire Attorney General Eric Holder | Washington Examiner: "All of the allegations of unauthorized methods - all of them - have already been carefully evaluated by career prosecutors. These were legal officials who, unlike Holder, do not owe their jobs to any partisan political figure.

Impartial prosecutors evaluated 20 incidents of unauthorized activity and decided against taking legal action in all cases but one. In that one case, in which a contract employee attacked a terrorist detainee with a metal flashlight, the contractor was found guilty. His case was appealed and his conviction upheld.

In other words, justice was done.

But apparently for Holder, justice under a Republican administration doesn't mean the same thing as justice under a Democratic administration."
This guy's a piece of work -pardoning vicious Puerto Rican terrorists, sleezy Democrat crony Mark Rich, refusing to pursue blatant voter intimidation by Black Panthers, and now he's going to flush $10's of millions on a witch hunt against loyal CIA operatives. I don't believe for a minute that the President doesn't support what he's doing. If nothing else, it is a great diversion from the growing attention on the ineptitude and corruption of the Obama administration.





Steyn Slices Through the Teddy BS

Mark Steyn: Things only a Kennedy could get away with | kennedy, ted, chappaquiddick, mary, senator -
Opinion - OCRegister.com: "When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked 'the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.' Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost 'civility' of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that 'Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution.'

Whoa! 'Liberals' (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked 'the end of civility' in American politics, that's a shoo-in."


Thank you, Mark Steyn, for telling it like it is.



What, Raising Taxes Doesn't Balance The Budget and Bring Prosperity?

Connecticut Governor Plans Income Tax Hike - WSJ.com: "Since the income tax became law, Connecticut has experienced a long, slow exodus of jobs and people. The Yankee Institute notes the astounding fact that since 1992, the year the income tax went into effect, businesses in Connecticut have hired a grand total of zero net new workers. This is while the nation added 22 million jobs and despite the Wall Street boom. As the tax burden has surged, the state lost population to other states (a net 113,000) in every year but one over the last decade.

What the income tax did stimulate was a spending binge and big pay raises for the state's unionized government workers."


In case you didn't learn this lesson from Europe, California, New York...





Friday, August 28, 2009

Even the Washington Post Sees Obama Rebuff of DC School Vouchers as "Wrong-Headed"

Beach Reading for Mr. Obama: Useful Literature on Schoomight cause the president to rethink his administration's wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students. l Vouchers - washingtonpost.com: "'The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government's official education research arm so far.' Equally adamant was his opinion that vouchers paid off for the students lucky enough to win them: 'On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation's capital.'

Mr. Obama, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has repeatedly promised to support 'what works,' so we figure he should be interested in Mr. Wolf's findings."...

Why would a Democratic administration and Congress want to cut such an experiment short?...

[Reading Mr Wolf's and another report] might cause the president to rethink his administration's wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students."


But WashPost, you are operating under a false premise. You think President Obama cares about DC public schools, the ones he won't send his own children to. But his policy has nothing to do with educating DC's struggling school children, and everything to do with paying off the unions and maintaining government control over primary education.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Let's Cancel The Porkulus Before it Buries Us

The Pelosi-Obama Deficits - WSJ.com: "We've never fretted over budget deficits, at least if they finance tax cuts to promote growth or spending to win a war. But these deficit estimates are driven entirely by more domestic spending and already assume huge new tax increases. CBO predicts that debt held by the public as a share of GDP, which was 40.8% in 2008, will rise to 67.8% in 2019—and then keep climbing after that. CBO says this is 'unsustainable,' but even this forecast may be optimistic."

Here's why. Many of the current budget assumptions are laughably implausible.

Need a good belly laugh? Read the assumptions behind the conclusion that we will have ONLY $9 TRILLION in deficits over the coming decade.

It is amazing that Obama's economic advisors had the gall to get on TV yesterday and try and pin these deficits on George Bush. Shameful.

We are burying our children and their children in debt. Disgraceful.



IF YOU READ ANY COLUMN THIS WEEK...

Fouad Ajami: Obama’s Summer of Discontent - WSJ.com: "A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the 'loudest voices' are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence...

So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without 'loud voices.' It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class."


...you must read this article. He nails the Obama presidency.

Monday, August 24, 2009

I Guess This Is What Democrats Mean By Energy Independence?

Oil Industry Details Costs of Climate Bill - WSJ.com: "Proposed federal legislation aimed at curbing global warming would drastically reduce domestic fuel production, according to a new study commissioned by the oil industry as part of its campaign to oppose new restrictions.

The report's findings, which are expected to be released Monday, project that by 2030, U.S. refining production could drop 17% from today's levels if the climate bill is passed as currently proposed. The drop would have to be made up by foreign imports, the study says, meaning the U.S. could end up relying on other countries for 19.4% of its refined fuel -- nearly twice the amount it imports today."


No wonder Obama is investing in Brazilian oil production. We are going to have to get our oil from somewhere, and apparently, it's not gonna be from the US of A.



Chutzpah

Obama Challenges Critics of Health-Care Overhaul - WSJ.com: "WASHINGTON-- President Barack Obama continued to confront critics of his health-care overhaul proposal in his Saturday radio and Internet address, charging them with making 'phony claims meant to divide us.'"


From the master of phony claims that divide us. Mr Obama, the President who:

Encourages envy of the "rich"
Claims his unbridled spending can be paid for by merely taxing the "rich"
Signed a $787B porkulus bill without the support of a single Republican member of the house
Named to the Supreme Court an ardent practitioner of racial and identity politics
Claims his Medicare spending plans will save money, when the CBO says they will cost money
Demonizes insurance companies, despite the fact that 70% or more of Americans are happy with them.
Refuses to prosecute Black Panther thugs despite the recommendations of career Justice lawyers
Hired the legally and ethically tainted ACORN to help manage the 2010 census
Has lead an effort to villify, discredit, and demonize ordinary Americans who have the temerity to disagree with his statist health care plan...




A Great Solution To Health Coverage for Indivuals That Won't Bankrupt Uncle Sam!

Insurance Companies Should Be Allowed to Sell Policies Across State Lines - WSJ.com: "A 2008 publication 'Consumer Response to a National Marketplace in Individual Insurance,' (Parente et al., University of Minnesota) estimated that if individuals in New Jersey could buy health insurance in a national market, 49% more New Jerseyans in the individual and small-group market would have coverage. Competition among states would produce a more rational regulatory environment in all states."

Oh, but wait, it won't concentrate power in Washington and necessitate a huge expansion of the federal bureaucracy. This idea stinks. Never mind.



Even If You're a Cap and Trade Fan, Waxman Markey is a Stinker

David Schoenbrod and Richard B. Stewart: The Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Bill is a Fraud - WSJ.com: "Progress on most or all such fronts will be needed, but when, where and how should be decided principally by a cap-driven market, not the 'red tape' that candidate Obama deplored.

This government dictation of technology would undermine President Obama's March 19 pledge that, by addressing climate change, we would become 'the world's leading exporter of renewable energy.' That requires coming up with better, lower-cost technologies than the rest of the world. This won't happen if the government picks the technologies. Recall that, in the 1980s, government established the Synfuels Corporation that spent billions to produce energy alternatives and came up with nothing. More recently, government required refiners to put corn-based ethanol into gasoline on the theory that it's good for the environment. Yet we've learned that wide-scale ethanol production can do more harm than good in regard to air quality and climate change, turn wildlife habitat into corn fields, and raise food prices."


Waxman Markey is not really a cap and trade bill. It is not designed to foster free market solutions to a post-fossil fuel economy. It is about statism, big government, central planning and maximizing power in Washington, DC. Does this sound familiar? Sound at all like ObamaCare?



Good News Out of Washington, For a Change

Obama Has Fewer Than Half of His Top Appointees in Place - NYTimes.com: "Of more than 500 senior policymaking positions requiring Senate confirmation, just 43 percent have been filled — a reflection of a White House that grew more cautious after several nominations blew up last spring, a Senate that is intensively investigating nominees and a legislative agenda that has consumed both.

While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission."


Oh no, Obama's statist mission being thwarted by a shortage of senior statists in Washington?

Time To Cash In All Those Apology Tour Chits

U.S. Military Says Its Force in Afghanistan Is Insufficient - NYTimes.com: "BAGRAM, Afghanistan — American military commanders with the NATO mission in Afghanistan told President Obama’s chief envoy to the region this weekend that they did not have enough troops to do their job, pushed past their limit by Taliban rebels who operate across borders."


Now that we have a President who apologizes and sweet-talks our allies, certainly offers of allied support must be streaming in, right?

Putting that issue aside, I am concerned that we are in the equivalent of Iraqi pre-surge mode in Afghanistan, only Afghanistan is a much more challenging situation than Iraq. The President needs to put forth a strategy for winning in Afghanistan, or else stop putting our forces in harm's way. And while we are unlikely to see a surge in allied forces in Afghanistan, how about a surge in allied funding?



Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The Government Can "Invest" Your Money Better Than You Can

» Special Report: Is US Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra a Phony? Dvorak Uncensored: General interest observations and true web-log.: "So what have we got so far from this person? Well, for starters we are looking at the Recovery.gov website that will cost the taxpayers around $18 million. This news was released recently. What websites costs $18 million? And that’s with no warrantee.

The incredibly popular Digg.com, one of the most advanced news gathering sites in the world was initially coded from scratch for between $1200-2500 according to one of its founders."


Fascinating story about the phony, self-promoting US CIO, hailed by the mainstream media as a "whiz kid." You'd think a whiz kid could launch a simple webiste for something south of $18M. And this guy is going to oversee our entire government's spending on information technology?



HEALTH CARE GOES POSTAL - New York Post

HEALTH CARE GOES POSTAL - New York Post: "The lines have gotten even longer lately because a couple of years ago the two machines selling stamps and other items were removed. I was stunned. When was the last time you saw something de-automated? Ever heard of anyone trading in their washing machine for a new washboard? Are you thinking about buying a car with a hand-cranked ignition system? An employee told me, 'It wasn't cost effective.' USPS logic: It's more cost-effective to make people wait in line to ask a unionized employee for something than to use a machine."


Hilarious. But sadly, this is the future of medicine if we get government-run health care.



Guess I'll Have to Begrudgingly Shop At Whole Foods

Obama Health Care Reform Riles Up Whole Foods CEO John Mackey - ABC News: "Like many of his fellow health food fanatics, Joshua said he will no longer patronize the store after learning about Whole Foods Market Inc.'s CEO John Mackey's views on health care reform, which were made public this week in an op-ed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal."


...but I won't pay extra for organic.

Well, John Mackey ran afoul of the totalitarian left. Apparently, according to the article, he is supposed to poll all of his pate and granola eating clients and only express their majority views. He certainly shouldn't oppose the Annointed One, nor express vicious views like these, published in the Wall Street Journal:

Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).

• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.

• Enact Medicare reform.

• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.


I think he may be a closet Nazi!!! Aren't there hate speech laws against stuff like this?

I predict that John's NPR subscribing clientele will be back at Whole Paycheck in no time, unable to resist the siren call of chic Eurofood.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Americans Aren't Brain Dead part XLVIII

Poll: Stimulus not helping Americans personally - Austin Business Journal:: "More than three-quarters of Americans say the economic stimulus is not helping their financial situation and another 57 percent say it is not helping the overall economy, according to a new poll.

Sixty-eight percent of those questioned in a survey of 1,010 adults by the Gallup Inc. for the USA Today newspaper said the Obama administration’s stimulus has not impacted their personal finances, while 13 percent said the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has hurt. Eighteen percent said federal economic efforts have made things better."


Starting out your administration by hawking and signing a $787B fraud is not a good way to build trust.



Sunday, August 16, 2009

Power Line - Quid Pro Quo

Power Line - Quid Pro Quo: "We noted here that the drug companies intend to spend $150 million--more than the McCain campaign's entire television advertising budget--on ads supporting Obamacare. Today on CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked Linda Douglass whether the ad campaign was part of the deal that the drug companies struck with the Obama administration:

...[SERIES OF REPEATED QUESTIONS BY WOLF BLITZER TO LINDA DOUGLAS ABOUT WHETHER PhRMA LOBBY AGREED IN WHITE HOUSE NEGOTATIONS TO DROP A COOL $150M IN TV ADVERTISING FOR OBAMACARE]...

BLITZER: So is part of the deal that they would support this legislation, go forward with $150 million in advertising?

DOUGLASS: You know, Wolf, part of the agreement here is that we're all going to work together to bring comprehensive health reform. I mean, clearly, the pharmaceutical industry said we are going to support comprehensive health reform. And that's what they're doing.

I guess that's a yes. This is beyond Astroturf; this is a veritable Jurassic Park of fake foliage."


Didn't candidate Obama say there wouldn't be any closed door meetings in the White House on big issues like health care? Didn't he say they'd be broadcast on C-SPAN? Another campaign promise broken.

Appeasing Chavez For the Approbation of the UN and OAS - Disgusting

Mary O’Grady: The U.S. Should Not Help Chavez Advance an Anti-American Agenda - WSJ.com: "Mr. Obama is the president and commander in chief, and millions of people in this hemisphere are counting on the U.S. to stand up to Venezuelan aggression. Playing footsie under the table with Mr. Chávez on Honduras while the Venezuelan is threatening the peace isn't going to fly in a hemisphere that prefers liberty over tyranny."


President Obama's approval ratings are remarkably good in foreign policy. I'd argue it is because in many respects he has begrudingly adopted the Bush policies he demagogued against on the campaign trail. We see in Honduras, when he strikes out on his own, he gets it completely wrong.



Saturday, August 15, 2009

Grasping for Straws, Obama Touts Savings From Preventitive Medicine

Charles Krauthammer - Preventive Care Isn't the Magic Bullet for Health Care Costs - washingtonpost.com: "Obama followed suit in his Tuesday New Hampshire town hall, touting prevention as amazingly dual-purpose: 'It saves lives. It also saves money.'

Reform proponents repeat this like a mantra. Because it seems so intuitive, it has become conventional wisdom. But like most conventional wisdom, it is wrong. Overall, preventive care increases medical costs.

This inconvenient truth comes, once again, from the CBO. In an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf writes: 'Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.'"


The President just keeps on trotting out rationalizations for ObamaCare, and they continue to be refuted by the facts. Savings from electronic medical records were going to pay for the whole thing. Nobody bought that. The Example of Britain's out of control NHS EMR program was brought to the fore. Then, his unaccountable national health board was going to drive savings that paid for the program. The CBO shot that down.

Now he claims prevention will pay for it, and he give wildly inaccurate anecdotal examples like his $30,000 diabetic foot amputation example. The CBO has already shot this one down, too. The President is not a dumb fellow. He could be educated on health care economics if he wanted to be. But of course, this whole program has nothing to do with health care economics, it has to do with wresting away control for 17% of our economy.



Petulant Child

Transcript: President Obama's Montana Health Care Town Hall Meeting - Kaiser Health News: "When the previous administration passed the prescription drug bill, that was something that a lot of seniors needed, right? They needed prescription drug help. The price tag on that was hundreds of billions of dollars. You know how we paid for it? We didn't. It just got added on to the deficit and the debt."


This response blew me away. It ranks right up there with the comment about how we shouldn't be afraid of a public option since we all know how inefficient the Postal Service is. In this one, the President is bringing up a fact that certainly argues against his health care expansion plans - we have yet to pay to pay for the last big government expansion in health care - yet he brought it up any way. WHY? He's like a petulant child who's being prohibited from doing something his older sibling got away with - "Georgie got to expand health care without paying for it, so I should be able to also, IT'S NOT FAIR!!!"

Axelrod better get the President back on teleprompter.



Friday, August 14, 2009

The Gipper Warned Us 48 Years Ago! The audio will give you chills.

Eject Eject Eject » A VOICE FROM THE PAST: "Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We had an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this."

-- Ronald Reagan, 1961
Uncannily prescient. What a joy to hear some much-needed common sense from this great man, plucked from 48 years ago. He goes on to talk about how supporters tried to ram the proposal through under the guise of crisis, and their unwarranted insistence that the probem be handled through a universal, mandatory, government program. Listen to Ronald Reagan himself delivering this message: Reagan audio




No Facts Please, We're Leftists!

John H. Cochrane: What to Do About Pre-existing Conditions - WSJ.com: "Health care and insurance are service-oriented, retail businesses. There is only one way to reduce costs in such a business: intense competition for every customer. The idea that the federal government can reduce costs by negotiating harder or telling businesses what to do is a triumph of hope over centuries of experience."

Private, competitive insurance markets are a superior way to solve the pre-existing-conditions problem, and the only hope to lower costs.

In this column the author, a University of Chicago professor (not a mere lecturer) explains how the means to handle the difficult problem of "pre-existing conditions" is already available in the private health insurance marketplace.



Thursday, August 13, 2009

Flag Myself

TO: flag@whitehouse.gov
SUBJECT: Fishy
Dear Flag,
Today I thought impure thoughts about the President's healthcare. I
thought it would cost too much, provide no improvement in care (actually
even worsen care!) and that it would expand the government bureaucracy
far too much. But then I got to thinking that the President has my
welfare in mind and that if He thinks this is good for me then it should
be good for Him too, right? Oh, wait...
Apparently Stephen Crowder of Big Hollywood inspired this piece by a friend who, hoping to maintain future federal job prospects, chooses to remain anonymous. Needless to say, they didn't actually email it to the enemies list at the White House.


Obama's End Game

SteynOnline - UNTANGLING THE SPAGHETTI: "The end-game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent”, I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a vast population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or education subventions) than it thinks it contributes, while another vast population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a government health bureaucracy) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another – say, the privately owned franchisee of a government automobile company, or the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what programs they’re eligible for. Either way, what you get from government – whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit or a government contract – is a central fact of your life."

None of the Obama agenda makes sense except in this context. It's not about health care, global warming, the auto industry, financial regulation, etc. - it is about control and the concentration of power in Washington. If we allow this power to be wrested from our states, our corporations, our civil institutions, our churches, and our individual citizens, we will never wrest it back. That's what's at stake in America right now.



Highlights of Coming Attractions In Canadian Health Care

Thousands of surgeries may be cut in Metro Vancouver, leaked paper reveals:
"# Health authority to cut funds for mental health and addiction service providers to save $400,000
# Core patient services face deep cuts in Metro Vancouver, NDP says
# Massive cuts planned for Fraser Health region: NDP
# 2,500 elective surgeries delayed for 2010 Games
# Health jobs cut, your fees and wait times will increase
# Elective surgeries to be cut by 35 per cent during Olympics"


I'll say it again. Despite all of President Obama's protestations, no nationalized health care system has demonstrated any propensity to slow or control the growth of health care spending, except thru draconian service rationing. Hat tip to Pragertopia.



Another Answer To My Friends Who Cite Euro Health Care

Barack Obama healthcare: NHS patients missing out, British expert warns - Telegraph: "“Inevitably in a tax-based government run health service, the increasing costs will be borne by younger working population.

“At a time of rapid health inflation due to innovative technology, this is just unsustainable. The same tensions apply to defined benefit pensions for public sector workers. We are rapidly approaching the point at which the political fudging of pensions and health care will no longer be possible,” he warned."

Read the whole linked article - lots of sobering facts about the British NHS.

Just as my earlier post on France indicated, the nationalized health care systems of Europe that President Obama wants to emulate are, in fact, careening out of control. They have not succeeded in controlling the growth of health care spending, despite sometimes draconian rationing.



Gutless Yale

Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book by Jytte Klausen - NYTimes.com: "Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book"


Folks, this whole book is about the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, but it will not contain images of the cartoons it chronicles! When our leading institutions are led by the gutless, there is no need for sharia or censorship, we will unilaterally impose them upon ourselves.

Hat tip to the Dennis Prager show and Pragertopia.



Cap-and-Trade's Unlikely Critics: Its Creators - WSJ.com

Cap-and-Trade's Unlikely Critics: Its Creators - WSJ.com: "Mr. Crocker and other pioneers of the concept are doubtful about its chances of success. They aren't abandoning efforts to curb emissions. But they are tiptoeing away from an idea they devised decades ago, doubting it can work on the grand scale now envisioned...
'I'm skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon,' says Mr. Crocker, 73 years old, a retired economist in Centennial, Wyo."

Add crap and trade to the list of discredited and dated ideas that the triumphal leftists are trying to foist upon the US.



Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Leftist M.O. - Screw Up A Market and When It Fails Propose To Fix It With More Government

The Truth About Health Insurance - WSJ.com: "If you develop an expensive condition such as cancer or heart disease, and then get fired or divorced or your employer goes out of business—then individual insurance is going to be very expensive if it's available. But what the President and Democrats won't tell you is that these problems are the result mainly of government intervention.

Because the tax code subsidizes private insurance only when it is sponsored by an employer, the individual market is relatively small and its turnover rate is very high. Most policyholders are enrolled for fewer than 24 months as they move between jobs, making it difficult for insurers to maintain large risk pools to spread costs."

When Leftists tell me the free market has failed in health care, I respond, "How do you know, we haven't tried it!"



Tone Deaf

Dorothy Rabinowitz: Obama’s Tone-Deaf Health Campaign - WSJ.com: "The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.

He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them."




Monday, August 10, 2009

The Era Of Special Interests is Over - Part 429

Arlen Specter Goes to Bat for the Trial Bar - WSJ.com: "To show what a loyal tort-lobby servant he is, Mr. Specter has also introduced a bill to let attorneys claim an up-front tax deduction on expenses they incur while building contingency fee cases. Amazing but true: Mr. Specter wants to give a tax cut to sustain the likes of Mel Weiss or Dickie Scruggs in the yachts to which they have become accustomed while they await jackpot jury verdicts. Even Democrats are too embarrassed by this giveaway (estimated cost: $1.6 billion) to pass it as a stand-alone bill, so tort lobbyist Linda Lipsen recently said “we have to tuck it into something” else, such as another “tax vehicle.”"



The Crux of the Matter - Give Patients A Stake In Decisions

In Health Fight, Government and Insurers Are Cast as Villains - WSJ.com: "doctors and patients, left to themselves, often order unnecessary and costly treatments, contributing to soaring national health costs."


The above statement is the health care cost issue in a nutshell. The closest thing to a solution is to design insurance plans that don't make patients and doctors accomplices in unnecessary health spending. If the patient were to question each expenditure, many times a lower cost alternative would be identified. The patient, however, will only do this if he has an economic incentive to do so.

Such economic incentives cannot address all of the challenges of allocating health care. To some degree, there will alway need to be limits imposed from above. Which then begs the question, "who do you want imposing those limits?" The choices are:

1) a government monopoly, under constant pressure from special interests, and perpetually underfunded
2) a choice of insurance companies and plans that compete for your business, and who, in many cases, have to lay out for you in advance what their criteria are going to be for limiting spending.

I can't believe anyone has to pause over such a choice.

Yesterday at a Tea Party Rally, I met a fifty year old four time survivor of breast cancer. Were she a ward of the British NHS, she'd be dead today. The very drugs that have kept her alive here in the US have been declared too expensive for British breast cancer patients.



Phoney Census

John S. Baker and Elliott Stonecipher: The 2010 Census Will Violate the Constitution - WSJ.com: "Next year’s census will determine the apportionment of House members and Electoral College votes for each state. To accomplish these vital constitutional purposes, the enumeration should count only citizens and persons who are legal, permanent residents. But it won’t."


Time to write your Senators and Congressmen again.



Did Porkulus Turn The Economy Around?

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- What's The Stimulus Have To Do With It?: "Claims that higher taxes and a total of $2 trillion in stimulus, TARP and bailout spending this year have turned the economy around are unconvincing. Indeed, they're farcical.

As economist Casey Mulligan noted on the New York Times blog after dissecting second-quarter GDP data, total stimulus at the state and federal levels amounted to about $12 per person. That's stimulus?"

Unprecedented, massive monetary stimulus by the Fed is what is bringing an end to the recession. And the wealth that has been restored in the stock market is going to encourage consumers, who feel wealthier to spend more generously going forward.

But regardless of what brought about this turnaround, since we are now on the mend, why don't we cancel the rest of the $700B+ of Porkulus that hasn't been spent and put a massive dent in the growing deficit/debt picture?



Watch Out - Now Global Warming Is A Security Matter...

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security - NYTimes.com: "WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say."

...a growing number [growing from 1 to 3? ;-)]of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.
[comment in brackets mine]

...And we know how much the left cares about national security. This might be a potent argument for crap and trade except that:

1) evidence points more strongly to us being in a global cooling than a global warming
2) a warmer planet is a richer planet
3) no serious link has been made between global warming and "violent storms"
4) even if there were evidence of 1 and 3, above, you would also have to believe that:
a) man is causing global warming
b) US carbon reductions, though more than offset by massive carbon output increases in the thrid world, will materially impact global warming

We are all nearly consumed with the health care debate. But we need to spend the recess debunking crap and trade as well.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Suckers

Charles Krauthammer - Obama Will Settle for Less on Health Care - washingtonpost.com: "But wouldn't this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers;"


Today's 18 - 34 year olds better get their heads out of their, er, out of the clouds, and into the political game, or the boomers are gonna rob them blind. They and their children will end up share-croppers on the big government-run cotton plantation, always owing more at the end of the year than they made.



I Didn't Know That!

Charles Krauthammer - Obama Will Settle for Less on Health Care - washingtonpost.com: "The CBO put in writing the obvious: In its second decade, Obamacare significantly bends the curve upward -- increasing deficits even more than in the first decade.

This is obvious because Obama's own first-decade numbers were built on arithmetic trickery. New taxes to support the health-care plan begin in 2011, but the benefits part of the program doesn't fully kick in until 2015. That excess revenue is, of course, one time only. It makes the first decade numbers look artificially low, but once you pass 2015, the yearly deficits become larger and eternal."


Doesn't it make you nostalgic for a straight-talking President like Bill Clinton?



Real Health Care Reform

Charles Krauthammer - A Better Plan for Health-Care Reform - washingtonpost.com: "Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant -- $20,000 for a family of four -- to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance)."


Krauthammer has a simple, two-point plan to reform health care:

1) Tort Reform
2) Real insurance reform, including ending the subsidization of employer-provided health care and giving the tax deduction/credit to the individual

I've advocated the same policies in prvious posts on this blog. Until such reforms are tried, the Left can't truly claim that the free market has been tried and found wanting.



Conformity is the New Dissent

OCRegister.com: "'Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help,' continued Commissar Phillips.

'If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.'

Reporting dissent is the highest form of patriotism! Is your neighbor suspiciously 'well-dressed'? Is he mouthing off about cancer survival rates under socialized medical systems while wearing a cravat? Give us his name, and we'll give you his spats! Just go to flag@whitehouse.gov, not to be confused with flagging@whitehouse.gov., which is the e-mail address for reporting President Obama's latest approval rating."


Thanks, Mark Steyn, for keeping us laughing through it all.



Another Profile In Courage

Transcript: "So they can’t hold town hall meetings now. They’re having to hold them in safe facilities. I think one of these guys is holding his town hall meeting in a children’s hospital. In effect, the children are acting as human shields to prevent the citizens expressing their anger toward him."




All Animals Are Equal, Some Are Just More Equal Than Others

Congress Gets an Upgrade - WSJ.com: "WASHINGTON -- Congress plans to spend $550 million to buy eight jets, a substantial upgrade to the fleet used by federal officials at a time when lawmakers have criticized the use of corporate jets by companies receiving taxpayer funds

Why does Congress need to fly in private jets while CEO's are expected to fly commercial? This is just disgusting. Congress has an UNLIMITED travel budget. Must be nice.



France Fights Universal Care's High Cost - WSJ.com

France Fights Universal Care's High Cost - WSJ.com: "France claims it long ago achieved much of what today's U.S. health-care overhaul is seeking: It covers everyone, and provides what supporters say is high-quality care. But soaring costs are pushing the system into crisis. The result: As Congress fights over whether America should be more like France, the French government is trying to borrow U.S. tactics.

In recent months, France imposed American-style 'co-pays' on patients to try to throttle back prescription-drug costs and forced state hospitals to crack down on expenses... And service cuts...are prompting complaints from patients, doctors and nurses that care is being rationed."

The French system's fragile solvency shows how tough it is to provide universal coverage while controlling costs, the professed twin goals of President Barack Obama's proposed overhaul.

Click the link above and read this article. One of the most persistent arguments I get from people defending the ObamaCare agenda is, "it works well in Europe, Europeans love their health care." Well, after I point out the Americans overwhelmingly love their health care too, I point out that the Europeans are living on borrowed time. As the article points out, the French system is running persistent deficits and health care costs are climbing steeply. Unfortunately, after decades of French citizens considering health care a God-given right, it has become politically impossible to implement reforms to bring costs back in line.

France has a nice system - lot's of choice - limited central planning. But, it does not have any free market mechanisms to help reduce costs at the margin. There are only two choices for the French going forward: 1) accept free-market reforms like co-pays, health savings accounts, etc, or 2) create an ObamaCare central authority to ration care. The health care free lunch is over.


Tuesday, August 4, 2009

America Spends "Too Much" On Health Care

"America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially)."
Mark Steyn skewers the tired argument that there is something inherently more with spending more of GDP on health care than other nations do.



ObamaCare Doesn't Even Beat the Straw Man

Arthur B. Laffer: Obama’s Health-Care Proposals Won’t Make Health-Care Better - WSJ.com: "a $1 trillion increase in federal government health subsidies will accelerate health-care inflation, lead to continued growth in health-care expenditures, and diminish our economic growth even further. Despite these costs, some 30 million people will remain uninsured.

Implementing Mr. Obama’s reforms would literally be worse than doing nothing."


Obama loves to offer straw man choices, like we can either do ObamaCare or do nothing. By design, the straw man alternative is the clear loser. But in this case, it's not. It turns out doing nothing is better than doing ObamaCare.


Straw Man 1, ObamaCare 0

Arthur B. Laffer: Obama’s Health-Care Proposals Won’t Make Health-Care Better - WSJ.com: "a $1 trillion increase in federal government health subsidies will accelerate health-care inflation, lead to continued growth in health-care expenditures, and diminish our economic growth even further. Despite these costs, some 30 million people will remain uninsured. Implementing Mr. Obama’s reforms would literally be worse than doing nothing."


Obama loves to offer straw man choices, like we can either do ObamaCare or do nothing. By design, the straw man alternative is the clear loser. But in this case, it's not. It turns out doing nothing is better than doing ObamaCare.

True Health Care Reform

Arthur B. Laffer: Obama’s Health-Care Proposals Won’t Make Health-Care Better - WSJ.com: "A patient-centered health-care reform begins with individual ownership of insurance policies and leverages Health Savings Accounts, a low-premium, high-deductible alternative to traditional insurance that includes a tax-advantaged savings account. It allows people to purchase insurance policies across state lines and reduces the number of mandated benefits insurers are required to cover. It reallocates the majority of Medicaid spending into a simple voucher for low-income individuals to purchase their own insurance. And it reduces the cost of medical procedures by reforming tort liability laws.

Sounds a lot like my post from last month. Make the patient a participant in the process of allocating scarce health care resources and you have a fighting chance to allocate them optimally.



Profiles In Media Courage

Howard Kurtz - Rahm Pushes the Networks - washingtonpost.com: "The networks 'absolutely' feel pressured, says Paul Friedman, CBS's senior vice president: 'It's an enormous financial cost when the president replaces one of those prime-time hours. The news divisions also have mixed feelings about whether they are being used.'"


Not enough spine to resist, but they have the guts to whine about it after the fact. Impressive.



That Was Then, This Is Now

EXCLUSIVE: No. 3 at Justice OK'd Panther reversal - Washington Times: "Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, was consulted and ultimately approved a decision in May to reverse course and drop a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party of intimidating voters in Philadelphia during November's election, according to interviews.

The department's career lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division who pursued the complaint for five months had recommended that Justice seek sanctions against the party and three of its members after the government had already won a default judgment in federal court against the men.

Front-line lawyers were in the final stages of completing that work when they were unexpectedly told by their superiors in late April to seek a delay after a meeting between political appointees and career supervisors"
Remember the endless hearings and hoopla over the Bush Justice Department exercising the President's prerogative to replace District Attorneys (political appointees)? Knowing how sensitive Congress is about politicization of Justice department decision-making, we can expect there to be twice as many hearings to investigate Obama political appointees over-ruling the advice of career Justice lawyers in a politically-charged case.

Right.