Jun 01 2010

Ronald Reagan’s crystal ball

Category: Democrat,economy,government,healthcare,legislation,liberty,socialismharmonicminer @ 8:13 am

I’ve had comments to make before about the background of “nationalized healthcare”, what it’s problems are, and so on. Here’s Ronald Reagon in 1961, before there was Medicare or Medicaid, let alone the recent takeover of healthcare by the federal government. He was amazingly prescient, wasn’t he?  He completely nailed the agenda behind Medicare, and the incrementalist approach he predicted is now historical fact.

I miss him.

As for the incremental approach, you don’t think the Left plans to stop here, do you?  Some may cavil at my characterization of Obamacare as a “takeover of US healthcare”, but regardless of where you think that line should be drawn, it is clear that the Democrats intend to cross it.   They are, by their own public pronouncements, not nearly done with the process of socializing American medicine.  This is only the first step.  They’ve said as much.
In the end, if we cannot reverse this monstrosity, we will all suffer for it, including even the now “uninsured”.


May 13 2010

A shocking admission?

Category: Congress,economy,government,healthcare,legislation,media,politicsharmonicminer @ 8:10 am

Health overhaul law potentially costs $115B more

President Barack Obama’s new health care law could potentially add at least $115 billion more to government health care spending over the next 10 years, congressional budget referees said Tuesday.

If Congress approves all the additional spending called for in the legislation, it would push the ten-year cost of the overhaul above $1 trillion, an unofficial limit the Obama administration set early on.

The Congressional Budget Office said the added spending includes $10 billion to $20 billion in administrative costs to federal agencies carrying out the law, as well as $34 billion for community health centers and $39 billion for Indian health care.

The costs were not reflected in earlier estimates by the budget office, although Republican lawmakers strenuously argued that they should have been.

Say it isn’t so! You mean, a newly minted government program is really going to cost more than they said it would?

I’m shocked and appalled. Mostly appalled.

Appalled that there is anyone, anywhere, who doesn’t think that the program is likely to cost 2 or 3 times as much as estimated, at a minimum… and maybe much more.

Of course, there are people in the world who know nothing of history.


May 12 2010

Welcome to California: Please don’t go home

Category: economy,government,politicsharmonicminer @ 8:00 am

California comes last

California came last in a survey ranking the fifty states and Washington D.C. as places to do business, underscoring the weakened competitive position of the state, and the Victor Valley.

The survey, conducted by Chief Executive magazine, asked business leaders to rank states based on taxation and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment.

Despite its favorable climate, California rated lowest in the survey for the second year running, due to high taxes and heavy regulations, high unemployment rate and heavy union presence.

Income tax runs as high as 10 percent for top earners, and many of those tax dollars go to benefits for California’s swelling number of government employees, with $500 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities for state workers. And unions are growing – from 16.1 percent of workers in 1998 to 17.8 percent in 2002.

Victorville City Councilman Ryan McEachron said he’s not surprised by the survey results, “but we need to do something to turn it around.”

As a councilman, McEachron is still stinging from seeing the Victor Valley lose over $30 million in redevelopment funds last week to fill state coffers. “That’s money we could have used to help create jobs,” he said.

As president and CEO of ARMAC Insurance, McEachron says he’s losing five to 10 accounts a month as many local companies shut down.

Emblematic of the problem:  Top policy analyst for Los Angeles City Council calls for 1,000 more job cuts (much more at the link)

The budget roller coaster at Los Angeles City Hall took another sharp turn on Tuesday, with the City Council’s top policy analyst calling for the elimination of 1,000 jobs on top of the 761 targeted by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in his proposed annual budget.

California is hemorrhaging tax-payers. Non-tax-payers are staying here, trying to collect more services, and public employees are staying here, because they are paid more here, and get better benefits packages, than they would in nearly any other state.

Remember those funny bumper stickers we used to see, when the joke was that “real Californians” didn’t want other people moving here and clogging the place up?

Well, things are different now.  Given that productive people are leaving the state in droves, for more business friendly places like Nevada, Texas and Utah, we desperately need people to move here and pay some taxes.

But what people, in their right minds, would come to California these days, unless they were coming from, oh, I don’t know, Kabul or something?

Herewith, my new bumper sticker:


Apr 08 2010

Young adults, with less money, will pay more

I just want to say thank you, once again, to all the young adults who voted for Obama. The fact that you volunteered to pay more for my health coverage and retirement is a sign of real respect for your elders.

Health premiums could rise 17 pct for young adults

Under the health care overhaul, young adults who buy their own insurance will carry a heavier burden of the medical costs of older Americans, a shift expected to raise insurance premiums for young people when the plan takes full effect.

Beginning in 2014, most Americans will be required to buy insurance or pay a tax penalty. That’s when premiums for young adults seeking coverage on the individual market would likely climb by 17 percent on average, or roughly $42 a month, according to an analysis of the plan conducted for The Associated Press. The analysis did not factor in tax credits to help offset the increase.

The higher costs will pinch many people in their 20s and early 30s who are struggling to start or advance their careers with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years.

Consider 24-year-old Nils Higdon. The self-employed percussionist and part-time teacher in Chicago pays $140 each month for health insurance. But he’s healthy and so far hasn’t needed it.

The law relies on Higdon and other young adults to shoulder more of the financial load in new health insurance risk pools. So under the new system, Higdon could expect to pay $300 to $500 a year more. Depending on his income, he might also qualify for tax credits.

At issue is the insurance industry’s practice of charging more for older customers, who are the costliest to insure. The new law restricts how much insurers can raise premium costs based on age alone.

Insurers typically charge six or seven times as much to older customers as to younger ones in states with no restrictions. The new law limits the ratio to 3-to-1, meaning a 50-year-old could be charged only three times as much as a 20-year-old.

The rest will be shouldered by young people in the form of higher premiums.

Higdon wonders how his peers, already scrambling to start careers during a recession, will react to paying more so older people can get cheaper coverage.

Of course, these people who are telling you that your premiums will go up by 17% are just trying to break it to you gently, to let you find out the truth in stages.  But this IS the government we’re talking about, and this IS an entitlement program, so you know, don’t you, that the real cost is going to be more.  Much more.  Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., all cost much more than anyone dreamed they ever would.   So will this.

And, of course, for the many young adults who could afford health insurance but have simply chosen not to buy it themselves (something like 1/3 of the currently “uninsured” if memory serves), their cost under the new regime will be much more than they currently pay…  which is nothing.  But we really need to grab these deadbeats and shake some money out of them.  Don’t they know that their turn will come later, to have the generations after them pay for their healthcare?

The young musician in the article above, Nils Higdon, is a perfect representative for your demographic, because even though he’s about to be soaked, he is willing for it to be even worse, by being for single-payer health care (you can read about it at the link above).  Very generous of him.  And you, since I’m sure you agree, being a young Obama voter who really respects your elders, and wants to take care of them even more.

I suppose it’s just a good thing for me that most young drummers haven’t read Adam Smith, or F.A. Hayek, or Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell.  Undoubtedly, the screeds from these promoters of the greed motive would have poisoned their young, impressionable minds.

I see that Mr. Higdon is a self-employed drummer.  In the real world, in this economy, that sometimes means he makes most of his living as a golf caddy.  I’ve always thought that golf caddies should pay more for the health care of the old duffers, er, golfers, that they serve.  I mean, since the caddies already fund their retirement via social security and incompletely funded government pensions and so on, it just seems reasonable. 

If you’re going to carry their clubs, you may as well carry them, too.


Mar 08 2010

Big Business is not in the Republicans’ pocket; its hands are in YOUR pocket, if you pay taxes… and everyone does, one way or another

At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg points out that big business supported Obama 2 to 1 against McCain, because it hoped to cash in at taxpayer expense:

It’s worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year. The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman’s political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration.

It’s not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes?

Because it was good business. A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama’s promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP).

Whatever the benefits of such a scheme for the economy and environment as a whole, these corporations, led by General Electric, were looking simply to cash in on government policies. GE, which makes many wind, solar and nuclear doodads that would be profitable under “cap-and-trade,” was poised to make billions if Obama succeeded in seizing control of the “carbon economy.” GE is still protecting its bet, but after the failure in Copenhagen, the “climategate” scandals and perhaps most significantly, that implosion of Obama’s new progressive era, several heavyweights — Caterpillar, BP and ConocoPhillips — have pulled out of CAP, with rumors that more will follow. There are similar rumblings of discontent within the ranks of PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, which had cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last year for its support of ObamaCare, only to see the whole thing unravel.

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not “right wing,” it’s vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these “crony capitalists.” But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

That’s good news. The bad news will be if the Republicans once again opt to be the cheap dates of big business. For years, the GOP defended big business in the spirit of free enterprise while businesses never showed much interest in the principle themselves. Now that their bet on the Democrats has crapped out, it’d be nice if they stopped trying to game the system and focused instead on satisfying the consumer.

Go back and read the title of this post. Then read this, to which I’ve linked before.  Ignore the reviews, pro and con, and just take it on its own terms… and see if you can refute the history.  I think you can’t.

There hasn’t been a “free market” in the USA for sometime.  The government’s power to tax and regulate, and to give tax breaks and regulatory exceptions, is the reason there is so much lobbying in the Beltway.  It could not have been otherwise, once corporate taxes got high, and the regulation of business became one of the chief functions of government.  The merry-go-round career path of government “service” to lobbyist, and often back to government “service,” is the biggest indicator of this.  The essential role of a lobbyist in the modern world is to figure out who should get the money that the lobbyist’s principals have to donate.

When big business couldn’t count on government to help it get captive markets, and to restrain competitors, it had to compete for consumers on the basis of price and quality.  That’s why Rockefeller kept cutting the price of kerosene in the 19th century, not exactly an act of violence against the consumers of the day.

It’s unfortunate that so many people still believe that we live in a “free market” economy and that “the market” is the cause for so much economic woe today.  But we have had a “mixed economy” that often crossed the line into “crony capitalism” or just plain “state capitalism” (especially in time of war), for over a century.  The government is by far the most responsible for our current economic mess.  The lobbyists of big business (the johns) wouldn’t have any place to spend their money if politicians weren’t pimping themselves out.  Those lobbyists are often the ones who write campaign finance law and regulations.

It’s simple.  If big business didn’t think it was going to get something out of it, why would it donate so much money to politicians?  And more particularly, why did it give so much to Obama?

Let’s hope that if the Republicans do get some power back, they don’t blow it this time.


Feb 08 2010

Did someobdy say something about “sustainability”?

Category: economy,government,Obamaharmonicminer @ 9:18 am

Mark Steyn: Unsustainable’s the new normal

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of “The West Wing” they can only conceive of the public, and, indeed, the world, as crowd-scene extras in “The Barack Obama Show.” They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

But, since Obama’s mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we’re getting there. National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah:

“Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Did you get your pay raise this year? What’s that, you don’t work for the government? Yes, you do, one way or another. Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan “taking action” to “resolve” that. In the past month, the cost of insuring Greece’s sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be an hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is choosing to embrace Greece’s future when even the Greeks have figured out you can’t make it add up. Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, “AP Economics Writer”:

“WASHINGTON, President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.”

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget “freeze spending”? And where’s the president getting all this money to “pour” into his “fight” against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn’t need so much money to “pour” away? Heigh-ho. Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life. If unsustainable is the new normal, it should also be the new national anthem. Take it away, Natalie Cole:

“Unsustainable

That’s what you are

Unsustainable

Though near or far

Like a ton of debt you’ve dropped on us

How the thought of you has flopped on us

Never before Has someone spent more … .”

It’s not the “debt” or the “deficit,” it’s the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to “some collapse down the road,” you’ll be surprised how short that road is.

As usual, when Steyn is done, there isn’t much left to say.


Feb 03 2010

It’s the tax cuts, stupid

Category: Congress,economy,Obamaharmonicminer @ 9:29 am

There is one guaranteed way to stimulate employment. That’s to cut taxes for employers, and make it known that the cuts will be in place for a very long time.  That stability will be the enticement that employers need to feel confident about expanding their operations.  This is historically verifiable for anyone who looks.  But in a strange dream that somehow strategies that have never worked before will now start to work,  Congress looks to create jobs, but will it be enough?

Democrats in Congress are furiously crafting legislation to spur job creation, but experts warn that the benefits could be too small to make much difference.

Senate Democrats plan to meet Tuesday to discuss a package that could provide billions in help for strapped state and local governments, as well as infrastructure projects. They’re also considering tax breaks to small businesses for hiring workers and to help make homes more energy-efficient.

The House of Representatives passed its own $154 billion jobs plan last month.

………………

Some analysts warned that such limited stimulus measures would hardly make a dent in a $14.2 trillion economy, however.

“It’s more of a painkiller than a cure,” said Robert Bixby , the executive director of the Concord Coalition , which monitors fiscal issues.

“While $150 billion might give the economy some stability, it’s not large enough to make much of a difference,” added Muhammad Islam , an associate professor of economics at St. Louis University .

…………….

“The roadblock is just general business confidence,” Bethune said. “Whether this kind of legislation will do the job is hardly clear.”

During his campaign, when a reporter pointed out to Obama that across-the-board tax cuts had created economic booms in the past, he said, regarding even-handed tax cuts for all economic classes, “It’s a matter of fundamental fairness,” by which he meant that tax cuts that benefit all economic classes, including the “rich,” are somehow unfair.  The Left, of course, is only for “targeted tax cuts,” meaning tax rebates to people who pay little or no tax..  and who do not engage in the kind of economic activity that creates jobs.

Crystal ball time (not that it’s especially difficult to predict that what has happened before will happen again):  the Democrat congress will not lower taxes generally, in a way that affects all businesses and likely employers.  They will fund a bunch of non-productive public works projects that will create flurries of employment, but nothing sustained, nothing that leads to a true recovery.  They will lionize themselves for small gains, and portray themselves as the great rescuers of the economy. 

Hopefully, the electorate will know better.  Of course, they didn’t in 2008.

Reagan proved that cutting taxes during a recession is the surest road to recovery.  Obama and the Democrats are raising them, regardless of what they say, simply by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010.

Some people are slow learners.


Oct 25 2009

Hello World Government? Goodbye freedom? UPDATE

Watch this, from Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute.

I haven’t heard much about this from other sources…. I’m trying to get more information about it.  But if this fellow isn’t exaggerating, this is looking really ugly.

More info here and here and some especially scary nonsense from Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister.


Aug 12 2009

God, guns, guts, American trucks, and clueless “reporters”

Category: economy,guns,mediaharmonicminer @ 9:03 pm

Mark Muller is giving away an AK-47 (presumably the civilian legal semi-auto only version, which does NOT qualify as an “assault weapon”) with every new truck he sells.  Well, he’s giving them a voucher so that if they can qualify for the legal purchase of the weapon, they can use the voucher to buy it from a licensed gun store.

Watch this thing, and then notice how utterly, completely, risibly clueless this interviewer is. Observe what she must think:

1) If you need to defend yourself, your gun shouldn’t be TOO good. You might actually survive the encounter, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?

2) God doesn’t want us to defend ourselves or our loved ones. I hope she doesn’t have children.  Or loved ones.  All of whom deserve better from her.  Or, she was just asking a stupid question for which she didn’t believe the premise herself.  Either way, clueless.

3) She’s obviously ignorant about the definition of “assault weapon.” Civilian legal versions of the AK-47 aren’t assault weapons, because they are semi-automatic ONLY, one round per trigger pull, exactly like semi-auto hunting rifles.  But wait, she went to journalism school, I’m sure.  And we know that they always do their background research, right?  (Sidebar:  if someone wants to kill me from a distance, I HOPE they’re using an AK-47 and not a typical American semi-auto rifle, which is usually a LOT more accurate.  With the AK, they’ll probably miss the first shot, and I’ll hear it and have time to seek cover.  Hey…  this is starting to remind me of faculty meetings, in which I spend lots of time taking cover.)

4)  She apparently thinks that Jesus doesn’t want parents to protect their children, each other, or themselves.  Or she doesn’t think that, and is just asking another disingenuous question of the country bumpkin rube auto dealer. 

Keep in mind that these geniuses are the ones reporting to us on nationalized healthcare, foreign policy, the economy, and political intrigue  everywhere.  You decide if you think they’ve done any more background research on that than on this story.


Jul 09 2009

Yessir, we’re all going green

Category: economy,energy,environmentharmonicminer @ 9:57 am

Of course, green is the color of mold, really bad teeth, and gangrene.


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