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WE WANT OUR TAX HIKES!!
Raging socialist democrats shut down the White House switchboard today after Barack Obama announced he would not pilfer money from wealthy Americans.
Roll Call reported, via FOX Nation:
"Liberal activists angry about President Barack Obama’s concession on tax cuts for upper-income Americans crashed two phone lines at the White House and are gearing up for another onslaught of calls to Senate Democratic leaders in an eleventh-hour push to kill the deal.
Supporters of the New York-based Agenda Project shut down two phone lines for most the day Monday in White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett’s office, according to the group’s founder, Erica Payne. And even though Obama ultimately announced a bipartisan deal that extends tax cuts for the wealthy, Payne said her group, which boasts 10,000 supporters, has plans to push back every step of the way.
Gitmo is staying open.
We’ve known this for a while. But it is assured with the news today that the recidivism rate among former Guantanamo Bay detainees has spiked to 25 percent and continues to climb. Barack Obama, who promised to close the facility within a year of his inauguration, badly miscalculated the political opposition to closing Gitmo. And, more important, he badly underestimated the threat presented by the 248 detainees who remained at Gitmo when he took office.
The new numbers are stunning: Since January 2009 the number of confirmed or suspected Guantanamo recidivists has doubled. For the first time, there are more confirmed recidivists (81) than suspected recidivists (69). The vast majority of recidivists were released under George W. Bush. But the Obama administration, which not long ago boasted that none of the Gitmo detainees released or transferred under its enhanced review process had returned to the fight, is responsible for five of the new recidivists. And multiple sources tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the number of Obama-era recidivists, like Bush-era numbers, will continue to climb quickly.
Back in the first week of the Obama administration, the new president and his advisers worked quickly to close Guantanamo Bay. An Obama-chosen task force had been studying the issue intensely since the election and upon taking office the White House moved with to repatriate or transfer detainees. Stephen Seche, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, a nation home to 100 Guantanamo detainees in January 2009, said that the new administration wanted to repatriate “a majority” of the Yemenis at Gitmo so that they might return to Yemen and “make a future for themselves here.” When THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked a State Department spokesman if Seche was speaking for the administration, he said that Seche’s comments “lay out very well the US government position on the situation of Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo.”
As the WikiLeaks cables related to Guantanamo Bay make clear, U.S. diplomats began a global effort to persuade allies to take detainees and, when that didn’t work, to bribe them to reconsider. But as the administration worked to empty Gitmo, reality was causing problems. The number of recidivists was growing steadily and the threat posed by those remaining at Guantanamo – the worst of the worst – was becoming clear. After the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound Northwest flight on December 25, 2009, the Obama administration stopped sending detainees to Yemen. “Right now, any additional transfers to Yemen is not a good idea,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs explained at a briefing.
All the while, the Obama administration, which had declared itself the most transparent administration in history, actively blocked the release of information on Gitmo recidivists. Congressional Republicans and journalists have been asking for the updated recidivism report for more than a year, only to be repeatedly stonewalled. When THE WEEKLY STANDARD editorialized about the lack of transparency back in December 2009, a Pentagon spokesman told us unapologetically that there were no plans to release an unclassified version of the report. Senator Kid Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to the administration demanding that the information be made public. When CNSNews.com filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information, the Defense Intelligence Agency responded by providing an outdated version of the report, which had already been substantively made public.
The administration was undeterred and sought to downplay the dangers associated with releasing or transferring individual jihadists. In some cases, sources say, administration officials rewrote threat assessments on the detainees produced by the intelligence community and the U.S. military.
And the only reason the administration is set to release the report now is that Congress, in the 2010 Intelligence Authorization bill, mandated that the office of the Director of National Intelligence make the information public by December 7, 2010.
So despite its efforts to keep the information hidden, it will be made public. And despite the efforts to close Guantanamo Bay, it will remain open.
150 former Guantanamo detainees are either “confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities,” according to a new intelligence assessment released by the Director of National Intelligence’s office on Tuesday. In total, 598 detainees have been transferred out of U.S. custody at Guantanamo. 1 out of every 4, or 25 percent, of these former detainees is now considered a confirmed or suspected recidivist by the U.S. government.
The DNI’s latest assessment is a significant increase over previous estimates. In June 2008, the Department of Defense reported that 37 former detainees were “confirmed or suspected” of returning to terrorism. On January 13, 2009 -- seven months later -- Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that number had climbed to 61. As of April 2009, the DoD found that same metric had risen further to 74 -- exactly double the Pentagon's estimate just 11 months before.
In February 2010, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, confirmed that the estimated number of recidivists had increased to 20 percent. At that recidivism rate, and based on the total number of detainee transfers at that time, between 110 and 120 former Guantanamo detainees were on the U.S. government’s recidivist list in early 2010.
Thus, the DNI’s latest assessment of the Gitmo recidivism rate is higher than all previous estimates by an appreciable margin.
As with past studies, the DNI differentiates between “confirmed” and “suspected” recidivists. For a former detainee to be considered a “confirmed” recidivist, analysts must find that a “preponderance of information” identifies “a specific former GTMO detainee as directly involved in terrorist or insurgent activities.” The standard for “suspected” recidivism is somewhat less, with only “[p]lausible but unverified or single-source reporting” being necessary.
The DNI finds that 81 of the 150 former detainees on its list are confirmed recidivists, while 69 are suspected. This, too, is a marked difference from previous estimates. The last assessment of Gitmo recidivism that was released to the public, dated April 7, 2009, found there were more suspected recidivists (47) than confirmed recidivists (27). Now, not only are there more confirmed recidivists (81) than suspected recidivists (69), but the number of confirmed recidivists has also increased dramatically – from 27 to 81.
Contrary to popular mythology, former detainees who have spread anti-American propaganda, but engaged in no other terrorist activity, are not included in either the suspected or confirmed categories.
The overwhelming majority of the 150 former detainees on the DNI’s recidivist list were transferred from Gitmo by the Bush administration. This makes sense since most detainee transfers (532 of the 598 total) occurred during the Bush years.
Of the 66 detainees transferred by the Obama administration, 5 are now on the DNI’s recidivist list. Two of the five former detainees are confirmed recidivists, while three are suspected.
As recently as February of this year, the Obama administration claimed that none of the detainees it had transferred had returned to terrorism. “We believe that significant improvements to the detainee review process have contributed to significant improvements in the results,” John Brennan wrote in a letter to House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Brennan continued:
“I want to underscore the fact that all of these cases relate to detainees released during the previous Administration and under the prior detainee review process. The report indicates no confirmed or suspected recidivists among detainees transferred during this Administration, although we recognize the ongoing risk that detainees could engage in such activity.”
While that may have been true at the time, it was not for long. In March, intelligence officials confirmed that Abdul Hafiz, a former Gitmo detainee who was transferred to Afghanistan in December 2009, had returned to terrorism. Hafiz is currently a Taliban commander who hunts charity workers in Afghanistan. Hafiz was held at Gitmo because he was implicated in the murder of a Red Cross worker.
The DNI’s new assessment notes that the “number of former detainees identified as reengaged in terrorist or insurgent activity will increase.” On average, there is “about 2.5 years between” when a detainee leaves Gitmo and the U.S. Intelligence Community first learns that he has reengaged in terrorist or insurgent activities.
In other words, it is likely that more detainees who have been transferred since January 2009, and even before, will be added to the DNI’s recidivist list in the future.
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
How much money will the Obama administration need to implement health-care reform? The only quasi-official guess thus far comes from the Congressional Budget Office, which pulled out the back of the envelope and in April gave Rep. Jerry Lewis, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, a range of $10 to $20 billion over ten years.
Half would be for the IRS to come up with the computer systems required to make the mandates work. Half would go to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to set up a bureaucracy to regulate the health-insurance market and implement new programs.
The legislation President Obama signed provided $1 billion up front for a “health insurance reform implementation fund.” This money remains available until it is spent. With CBO suggesting $1 to $2 billion a year, it would seem that implementation would collapse before the January 1, 2014, “big bang” when new mandates, new subsidies, and broader Medicaid eligibility take effect. One argument: Even if Congress can’t pass “repeal and replace,” it can stop implementation by refusing to appropriate any more money.
The government’s financial statement for the fiscal year that ended September 30 shows HHS could get by with the money it already has. At the end of the fiscal year, six months into implementation, there was $965 million left. Of the $35 million spent, the biggest chunk ($23 million) got transferred to the IRS. HHS itself only spent $12.4 million.
If the burn rate were to remain this low, the $1 billion already available could last a long time. For example, even if $12.4 million was what it took each month to fund a fully staffed-up bureaucracy, there would be no problem getting to the January 1, 2014, date when the new entitlement spending goes live, even if HHS did have to share half or more of the $1 billion with the IRS.
Yes, without more money, outreach and public-awareness campaigns would have to be scrapped. There would be no money for 1-800 numbers and call centers staffed to answer questions. Employers and citizens would have to make do with the FAQs posted on web sites. The IRS might not be able to make the individual mandate work as well without more money for computer systems, or it might find itself stretching out systems upgrades if forced to “eat” the cost of its role in enforcing mandates and making data available to calculate eligibility for subsidies. Like the rest of our tax code, the mandates on employers and individuals would rely on voluntary compliance.
All that’s needed to keep implementation going is enough money to staff a bureaucracy that can get rules published in the Federal Register. HHS has shown that $12.6 million can publish a whole set of rules -- already the new bureaucracy has produced rules setting standards for health plans and regulating financial aspects of health insurance.
Secretary Sebelius and her staff read the papers. They know that many in the new Congress will not want to give them another penny to implement health-care reform. They would be wise to develop a contingency plan to deal with that possibility. But the spending pattern of the first six months shows it will not be possible to starve the beast.
— Hanns Kuttner is a visiting fellow at Hudson Institute.
Gas prices are approaching $3 per gallon and may go considerably higher. $100 a barrel oil is seen as likely. Obama has choked off some oil production in the Gulf and made us more dependent on foreign oil. The economy is in tatters. Unemployment is at 9.8%. Barack Obama has brought this country to its knees.Now comes the knockout punch.
On April 19 EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson ruled that carbon dioxide, a gas vital to the growth of green plants, is a pollutant. The ruling gave the White House an almost unlimited control of the country and its energy.
Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, signed a so-called endangerment finding, stating that carbon dioxide and five other products of fossil fuel combustion are harmful to both the environment and to human health. As a result, the EPA could begin regulating automotive CO2 emissions as soon as June. The ruling also gives the EPA broad power to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from industry and electric power utilities for the first time.
This ruling is estimated to cost at least $3 billion:
The Environmental Protection Agency said the new rule represented its most consequential effort yet to tackle pollution that contributes to smog and soot that hangs over more than half the country. The rule would cost nearly $3 billion a year, costs that are likely to be passed along to consumers.
“Likely to be passed along to consumers….”
Likely? Ya think? Those WaPo guys really deserve all those Pewlitzers. They’re geniuses.
The $3 billion cost is most likely a gross underestimate. When did the government ever get a fiscal projection right?
That cost is only the beginning.
But industry groups said it will boost power prices and force many older coal-fired power plants to be closed. Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA official who authored the original interstate rule, said it was not clear whether utilities will be able to meet the new standards while still providing affordable and reliable electric power.
The nation’s power need does not diminish- it grows each year. And it is going to hit the US population hard.
The Affordable Power Alliance recently released a study showing the cost impact of the EPA regulations on minority families, who live in these coal-reliant areas of the country. The APA found that, by 2025, the EPA regulations will increase the poverty rate by 20 percent for African-American families and 22 percent for Hispanic families, while decreasing median minority household incomes by as much as $660 per year and leading to hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a report outlining the impact of the new regulations:
•New standards for commercial and industrial boilers: up to 798,250 jobs at risk;
•New standards for Portland Cement plants: up to 18 cement plants at risk of shutting down, threatening nearly 1,800 direct jobs and 9,000 indirect jobs;
•The Endangerment Finding/Tailoring Rules for Greenhouse Gas Emissions: higher energy costs; jobs moving overseas; severe economic impacts on the poor, the elderly, minorities, and those on fixed incomes; 6.1 million sources subject to EPA control and regulation; and
•The revised National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone: severe restrictions on job creation and business expansion in hundreds of counties nationwide.
The Washington Examiner compiled a list of the effects on small businesses:
Regulatory compliance costs are skyrocketing. According to a Small Business Administration report titled “The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms,” the total cost of complying with federal regulations is $1.1 trillion a year as of 2004. That’s more than $10,000 per household. The cost of regulatory compliance was just $7,000 in 1995 — up 30 percent in less than a decade.
Of that total, environmental regulation is estimated to cost $221 billion a year, second only to a broadly defined category of “economic regulation.”
The SBA also reports that environmental regulation is the leading regulatory expense for businesses with fewer than 20 employees, at $3,296 per worker.
Overall, regulatory costs are 45 percent higher for small businesses than for larger firms, and environmental regulations are the “main cost drivers in determining the severity of the disproportionate impact on small firms,” according to the SBA. Compliance with environmental regulations costs 364 percent more for small firms than large firms.
And what will these new regulations do? Has anyone actually guaranteed what the benefits will be? Well, the EPA has.
Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the global mean temperature by only 0.006 to 0.0015 of a degree Celsius by the year 2100, according to the EPA’s analysis.
Billions in direct costs. More dependence on foreign oil. Perhaps as many as 1 million jobs lost.
For six thousandths of a degree Celsius.
If you’re tempted to believe anything the Obama administration says about these new rules, think “Obamacare.”
Then they’ll tell that this will be a boon for green technologies like solar panels.
Did you know that nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 more potent a greenhouse gas than is CO2? Did you know that the levels of NF 3 have increased twenty-fold in the last decade?
Why no, you say. Why do you ask?
Because NF3 is used in the manufacture of solar panels.
According to the Scripps Institute; “ the present 5,400 tons in the atmosphere…is on the rise at 11 percent per year” – that will stay there for 700+ years – creates the equivalent warming of all Finland’s CO2 emissions.
According to Lubos, given the fact that the solar panels produce about the same percentage of the global energy as Finland, it is reasonable to guess that the state-of-the-art solar panels that would replace fossil fuels would cause a comparable amount of warming per Joule as fossil fuels.
I’ll bet you neither Barack Obama nor Lisa Jackson know that.
And about that global warming?
It’s stopped. Dead.
Actually, with the exception of 1998 – a ‘blip’ year when temperatures spiked because of a strong ‘El Nino’ effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) – the data on the Met Office’s and CRU’s own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.
They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system’s acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all.
DADT repeal, DREAM Act, Cap and Trade and now this?
I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Barack Obama is the Presidential version of Wrong Way Corrigan. It’s as though the patient enters the doctor’s office complaining of chest pains and Dr. Obama inserts breast implants, performs Restylane lip enhancement and injects botox.
The doctor does everything except for what the patient needs because the doctor is eager to make a name for himself.
The patient dies.
Heckuva job, Barry.
It’s a damn shame you can’t sue a President for malpractice.
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Why does anyone engage the Stimulus as if it was a serious piece of legislation by the Democrats?
1. President Obama and the Democrats didn’t believe the economy was that bad to begin with and participated in “talking it down” for election purposes and then political purposes.
2. Data suggests that the recession was over in June after Obama became President. We’ve been having a jobless recovery. In fact, we’ve lost jobs. Isn’t it awesome?
3. The stimulus is still not entirely paid out. A good chunk of the money is timed to hit before the Presidential election.
4. Jobs weren’t created. Government jobs and states in over their heads were “saved”, but the gig is up because no further bailouts are forthcoming.
5. The Stimulus paid off vast Democrat constituencies–the unions, the unions, oh, and the unions.
Does any of this create jobs? Why no, no it does not. But that’s the stupid part. It was never intended to create jobs. It was never intended to be anything other that it was: a monstrously huge windfall and payoff for all the big Democrat political donors.
So, by those metrics, the Stimulus succeeded. It’s been a good two years being a Democrat.
Updated: More from Yid with a Lid.
"While we learned yesterday that the U.S. is preparing its domestic response to a potential economic collapse, the bigger story might be that the U.S. has been playing such “war games” for almost two years.
“The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.” That’s how Politico reporter Eamon Javers (now with CNBC and who brought us Monday’s report) began an article dated April 9, 2009.
In that article, he describes how the U.S. first began preparing for an economic collapse. “Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data,” he writes. “Their efforts were carefully observed and recorded by uniformed military officers and members of the U.S. intelligence community.”
The Office of the Secretary of Defense hosted the two-day event March 17 and 18, 2009, at the Warfare Analysis Laboratory in Laurel, MD.
The “game” didn’t end well for the United States: “the savviest economic warrior proved to be China.”
“We were allowed to fight with financial weapons only (stocks, bonds, currencies, gold, reserves, etc.) and no kinetic weapons,” James Rickards, who participated in the game, told The Blaze in an e-mail.
“This was an example of the changing nature of conflict,” Paul Bracken, a professor and expert in private equity at the Yale School of Management who attended the sessions, told Javers. “The purpose of the game is not really to predict the future, but to discover the issues you need to be thinking about.”
“Why would the military care about global capital flows at all?” asked another person who attended the game. “Because as the global financial crisis plays out, there could be real world consequences, including failed states. We’ve already seen riots in the United Kingdom and the Balkans.” That was in 2009, before European unrest began grabbing headlines weekly.
Those real-world consequences are exactly what the U.S. is preparing for. And according to a picture we stumbled upon, those consequences include civil unrest over lack of food caused by a financial crisis.
This picture, reportedly released by the Air Force, shows Alaska National Guard troops taking part in a training exercise. According the picture’s caption, “Alaska Army National Guard Soldiers assist Anchorage Police to calm or detain rioters as part of the training scenario of exercise ‘Vigilant Guard.’” One actor is holding a sign saying, “FOOD NOW!”:
“America‘s intelligence community has said the global economic crisis is now the top threat to the nation’s security,” NPR reported in February ‘09. “The downturn could produce political instability and damage the ties that hold countries together. Countries might even be tempted to engage in financial warfare, officials say.”
Rickards was quoted in that piece saying the tempted could include a country such as China. “You can envision scenarios where they launch a financial attack, you know — a Pearl Harbor on the dollar, if you will,” he said. “And those are the things that I think national security professionals rightly think about. But it doesn’t even have to be that. It could just be China acting in its own best interests, in a way that causes interest rates to go up, the dollar to go down.”
Fox Business also reported on the war gaming in ‘09 and laid out a shockingly relevant scenario involving none other than China:
Picture this hypothetical dreamed up by a national security expert obsessed with economic catastrophe:
Angry that U.S. policies aimed at boosting the economy have devalued their $2 trillion of currency reserves, the Chinese decide to stop buying Treasurys just as America tries to finance its massive spending plans.
In response, the U.S. imposes trade sanctions against China, which in turn pushes for a global currency. From there, the U.S. accuses China of manipulating its own currency and things escalate further.
Without a shot being fired, those actions represent a type of unfriendly economic competition that some are very worried about.
At the time, Fox reported that the Pentagon would hold future war games. That seems to have happened last month as Javers recently reported.
The new war game, called Unfied Quest 2011, “is the Army Chief of Staff’s primary mechanism to explore enduring challenges and the conduct of operations in a future operational environment.”
“Army officials met outside Washington last week for a thought experiment about the implications of a large-scale economic breakdown that would force the Army to absorb significant funding cuts and prepare the service for an increased role in keeping domestic order amid civil unrest,” InsideDefense.com reported on the recent games.
The article says officials chose the global financial collapse scenario because “it was deemed a plausible course of events given the current global security environment.”
“In such a future,” it reports, “the United States would be broke, causing a domino effect that would push economies across the globe into chaos.”
The latest game included a grim outlook: cuts in defense and international relations, fragmentation of power, and consolidation of “common functions, like logistics, training, medical services and information systems.”
But there was one “sliver lining” according to the article: “The Army would have an influx of qualified recruits as the result of an unemployment rate between 25 percent and 30 percent.”
"No one is more familiar with the health care system than doctors. So what do they have to say about Obamacare? Nothing good, according to a recent survey.
The Physicians Foundation found that “rather than a sign of progress, the survey suggests that most physicians view health reform as a further erosion of the unfavorable conditions with which they must contend.” Furthermore, Obamacare “has further disengaged doctors from their profession, with potentially negative consequences for both the medical profession and for the quality and accessibility of medical care in the United States.”
Sixty-seven percent of respondents initially held a “very negative” or “somewhat negative” impression of Obamacare. When asked how their feelings had changed months after passage of the law, 51 percent said they felt the same, while 39 percent felt more negative. Furthermore, 86 percent of respondents said physicians’ perspectives were not adequately taken into account during the reform process.
Physicians also expressed concern that Obamacare will further erode the quality of health care in the United States. Only 10 percent of respondents expect the health law to improve quality of care, while 56 percent expect quality to diminish. As a result of the new law, a majority of physicians expect to spend less time with patients and restrict their practice significantly for certain types of patients, especially Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.
Sixty-five percent of the survey respondents confessed to holding a “somewhat negative” or “very negative” attitude toward the practice of medicine after passage of Obamacare, an increase from 49 percent before enactment. And no wonder: The new law darkens the future for practicing and aspiring physicians in several harmful ways.
According to the Physicians Foundation, Obamacare will exacerbate the pending physician shortage, making it more difficult for patients—especially those on Medicare or Medicaid—to access care. In addition, Obamacare will largely replace the private practice model by compelling physicians to consolidate or become hospital employees.
Heritage analysis shows that the new law will reduce physician autonomy, weaken the doctor–patient relationship, and increase the role of the federal government in medical decision-making. Physicians will also face more bureaucratic hoops to jump through, requiring the devotion of more time to meeting administrative requirements.
Finally, Obamacare fails to address growing concerns already facing the medical profession. According to Heritage health policy expert Robert Moffit:
It is hard to imagine how the health law will improve the prospects of the medical profession. … The medical liability problems that confront physicians in many states remain. Moreover, the existing system of administrative payment for doctors and other medical professionals under Medicare and Medicaid, a deepening problem for physicians, is re-entrenched with federal program coverage expansions.
The Physicians Foundation claims that health reform was “necessary and inevitable,” but Obamacare is the wrong way forward. By creating new problems within the practice of medicine and inflaming existing ones, Obamacare will succeed only at hurting the medical profession.
"Senate leaders reached an agreement Monday to delay cuts to physician reimbursement rates under Medicare for one year. The details of the negotiations have yet to be ironed out, but if the deal makes it through Congress, doctors will avert a 23 percent pay cut scheduled for January 1.
Heritage health policy expert Bob Moffit explains in a recent post that the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, enacted in 1997, arbitrarily ties Medicare physician reimbursement to the overall performance of the economy, meaning that when payments grow faster than the economy, automatic reductions go into effect.
In theory, that is. Congress has continually delayed the reductions to avoid reducing seniors’ access to health care. (This delay is known as the “doc fix.”) As reimbursement rates drop, more physicians become inclined to limit the number of Medicare patients they see. Some are even forced to stop accepting Medicare altogether. As Congress continues to stop the cuts from going into effect, they accumulate, so failure to act now would serve doctors a crippling 23 percent pay cut in 2011.
A Red Flag
It is good news that there is agreement to delay the physician payment cuts for another year. The bad news is that the Senate leaders say that they will pay for the one-year doc fix now with hopes for savings in the future. Where will the Senators get these savings? From future improper payments of taxpayer subsidies to individuals and families for health insurance under Obamacare—that begin in 2014.
For fiscal conservatives, this raises a red flag. Obamacare creates a new system of taxpayer subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans to purchase health insurance in state health insurance exchanges beginning in 2014. If some future person, under this future system, gets an improper payment because, for one reason or another, he is no longer eligible for the subsidy, he must return a portion of it. So Senate leaders are betting on enough mistakes—improper payments—to secure the $19 billion. This is a fragile scenario.
A better idea is to pay for the doc fix with current offsets in other areas of spending. Raising the necessary amount of improper payments individuals must return tomorrow to pay for the spending today is, well, another congressional exercise in creative financing.
Fix It for Good
A temporary extension is far from the permanent fix that is needed. Congress should have tied the current fix to a requirement to get rid of the SGR formula for good and pay for it, too. A stable payment schedule for physicians would ensure access to care for seniors and could be paid for by cutting other spending now and using Obamacare’s Medicare cuts later. In principle, any and all savings found in Medicare should be funneled back into the program itself to strengthen it and increase its solvency, not used to fund a new entitlement program.
But Congress should not stop here. The flawed physician payment system is just one of the many symptoms of the flawed approach under which the Medicare bureaucracy micromanages seniors’ care. True transformation would resolve these flaws. Lawmakers need look no further than their own health program—the Federal Employers Health Benefit Program (FEHBP)—for the best way forward in Medicare reform. Proposals that borrow from the FEHBP’s premium support system are already out there, starting with Representative Paul Ryan’s (R–WI) Roadmap for America’s Future and echoed in both the Bipartisan Task Force’s plan for deficit reduction and a separate proposal from Ryan and Alice Rivlin.
Through the right reform, Congress could eliminate the need for a constant doc fix and several other long-term problems inherent in the current Medicare system.
"'Entanglement?' The 1st amendment to the US Constitution reads 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.' Where does the word 'entanglement' appear there? And if the Congress can make no law prohibiting the free expression of religion, what law will they be breaking?...President Obama has amended a 2002 Executive Order from President George W. Bush that allowed faith-based social programs to get federal aid.
Illegal activity according to Obama
Bush's order allowed religious services to be conducted at the same time and in the same place as the social program offered, so long as the service itself was not supported by the money allocated to the social program.
Thus, visitors to a soup kitchen run by a church might hear a sermon while getting their food.
President Obama's amendment mandates separation of the two activities, in time or place, and forbids making participation in a religious activity a requirement for receiving the benefits of the federally funded program.The amendments also require the government to 'monitor and enforce standards regarding the relationship between religion and government in ways that avoid excessive entanglement between religious bodies and governmental entities.'
This isn't separation of church and state, words not in the US Constitution, it is a separation between faith and state, something antithesis to what the Founding Fathers planned for us. In May I wrote this post: Good grief! Seniors Barred from Praying Before Meals at Nursing Home Because Meals Are Subsidized By Feds. Our the government was set up in part to promote, but not establish, Christianity - the true religion. After all, the pilgrims sailed here for that very reason, no? It's worthy to note that Thomas Jefferson himself made federal money available for the building of churches and the printing of Bibles. By the way, where do our unalienable rights originate from exactly? We need only look at history:Religious organizations will have to refer beneficiaries of federally funded programs who object to the religious character of the program provider to an alternative provider within a 'reasonable period of time.'
To enforce the new requirements, the amendment creates the Interagency Working Group on Faith-Based and Other Neighborhood Partnerships, which is charged with writing rules to implement the changes across the government and all organizations that receive federal funding.
$447 BILLION?!?! Good grief!President Obama spoke of the need for sacrifice last week when he announced a two-year pay freeze for federal employees.
But feds won't be too terribly deprived in 2011 and 2012. Despite the freeze, some 1.1 million employees will receive more than $2.5 billion in raises during that period.
Congress is expected to approve Obama's proposal, which cancels only cost-of-living adjustments for two years. Regularly scheduled step increases for the 1.4 million General Schedule employees — who make up two-thirds of the civilian work force — will continue. The size of those increases ranges from 2.6 percent to 3.3 percent and by law kick in every one, two or three years, depending on an employee's time in grade.
...Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, called the retention of step increases a hole in Obama's plan. He also said the administration should freeze hiring and reduce the federal payroll from $447 billion to $400 billion.
'Somehow, someway I think this country can survive on just a $400 billion payroll,' Chaffetz said. He is the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the federal work force, and could become chairman when Republicans take control of the House next year.Bonuses at taxpayer expense. Funny how generous liberals are with other people's money when they aren't with their own.
In addition to General Schedule employees receiving step increases, some of the government's roughly 187,000 wage-grade employees also will receive step increases.
And many employees will receive promotions, which also come with salary increases, Jeffrey Zients, the Office of Management and Budget's deputy director for management, said last week.
Many senior employees won't get raises, but will receive bonuses for good performance, although OMB and the Office of Personnel Management are telling agencies to cap bonuses at 2010 levels. OPM said it does not yet have information on fiscal 2010 bonuses, but the Asbury Park Press of New Jersey reported in June that the government paid $408 million in bonuses to 359,400 people, an average $1,135 each, in fiscal 2009.
Wilson’s [SF Federal Reserve] study makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing on state-by-state comparisons. A large portion of stimulus funding at the state level was based on criteria that were entirely independent of the economic situation that states faced. For example, the number of existing highway miles was used to calculate additional transportation spending.
The study uses this resulting variation in state-level stimulus funding to determine what impact ARRA funding had on employment — including both the direct impact of workers hired to complete planned projects, as well as any broader spillover effects resulting from greater government spending. Administration economists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of this indirect employment growth in driving economic recovery.
The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.It gets better, because the study also shows that stimulus generated federal assistance to state Medicaid plans may have cost jobs.
One possibility is that requirements to maintain full Medicaid benefits in order to receive federal aid proved sufficiently expensive that state governments pushed though additional rounds of layoffs in non-health related areas.The report says cautions not to regard it as infallible but:
The burden of proof is now increasingly on the side of fiscal stimulus advocates. It is easy to point out possible flaws in each of the studies mentioned here — though the biases may end up either exaggerating or diminishing the estimates of the effects of the stimulus. But where is the evidence that the 2009 ARRA fiscal stimulus enhanced employment recovery in a cost-effective and sustainable manner?
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TIME Magazine will name enemy combatant Julian Assange as its “Person of the Year.”
Wire Update reported:
"TIME magazine will name WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange the 2010 ‘Person of the Year’ according to the Drudge Report, citing unnamed sources. Assange ,who was arrested Tuesday morning in England for sex crimes, was leading TIME’s online poll.
The final decision by TIME magazine editors is expected later this month.
Assange was taken into custody at around 9.30 a.m. UK time after he appeared at a London police station by appointment. He was wanted in Sweden on accusations of sexual molestation and rape, unrelated to his work for the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks which brought diplomatic hurricanes to the United States this year when it began releasing classified documents it had obtained.
Race hustler Al Sharpton says his group is going to go to the FCC next week to get Rush Limbaugh off the air.
Via Real Clear Poitics:
RCP posted the transcript:
“We’re not going to stand by and let publicly regulated radio and television just go for marketing and promoting this kind of racism,” Al Sharpton said about his campaign to take Rush Limbaugh off the airwaves.
Sharpton says he will be going to the FCC next week to demand Limbaugh be taken off the air.
“Rush Limbaugh has the right to say whatever he wants to say, he does not have the right, though, to do it on publicly regulated airwaves. The FCC has the responsibility to set standards,” Sharpton added.
“You can’t say — in the name of free speech, you can’t say anything you want,” Al Sharpton said on MSNBC. “We’re not talking about stopping free speech,” he added.
“We’re not telling Rush don’t say what you want to say, say it at home, not on public airwaves,” he concluded.
Should Al Sharpton really be the one talking about racist hate speech?
"A group of conservative lawmakers were forced to send President Obama a letter yesterday after he messed up the national motto during a speech in Indonesia.
Obama told an Indonesian audience that the national motto was E pluribus unum – “Out of many, one.”
It’s not. They national motto is “In God We Trust.”
One News Now reported, via Free Republic:
A letter signed by 42 members of Congress criticizes President Barack Obama for telling students in Indonesia last month that America’s national motto is “E Pluribus Unum.”
Obama commented to the students last month that the U.S. and Indonesia share a similar history. “It is a story written into our national mottos. In the United States, our motto is ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — out of many, one.”
In a letter to the White House, members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus — mostly Republican — note that the national motto has been “In God We Trust” since 1956.
In God We Trust became the official motto of the United States in 1956. The change was motivated in part by a desire to differentiate between communism, which promotes Atheism, and Western capitalistic democracies, which were at least nominally Christian.
"Is this really what the Republican Party needs going into 2012?
(Politico)
Maria Cino, the former Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of Transportation under President George W. Bush announced her intention of running for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee in November. She has a distinguished career as a politician in the Republican Party. Maria Cino also worked as an Obamacare lobbyist for Pfizer, the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company since 2009. Pfizer CEO Jeffrey kindler was a staunch supporter of Obamacare. According to the Wall Street Jounal,
No one pushed harder (for Obamacare) than Mr. Kindler. The CEO made no fewer than five trips to the White House last year… He wrote an op-ed with the SEIU’s Mr. Stern demanding reform. He pressed the industry’s $150 million ad campaign promoting ObamaCare, rolled out with liberal activist groups.
Since 2009 Marian Cino worked as a lobbyist for this pro-Obamacare company. Now she wants to be the chair of the Republican National Committee?
Does anyone else have a problem with this?
Dan Riehl has the goods on Cino at Big Government including her $1,000 donation to liberal Mike Castle in the Delaware primary.
UPDATE: MrGoodWrench nailed it in the comments:
"Cino = Conservative In Name Only
More hope and change…
Obama blamed the Republican “hostage takers” today for his caving in on the Bush tax cuts.
“It’s tempting not to negoitate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed… In this case, the hostage was the American people.”
Click on Photo for video–
(Reuters)
Obama also called Republicans “bomb throwers.”
Obama also said the tax cuts for the wealthy were the Republican’s Holy Grail.
…Just like tax hikes are the democrat’s Holy Grail, we can assume.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous address to the nation in which he refers to Dec. 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy” can be seen below:
Via AOL News - (Dec. 7) — It lives on in infamy.
On Dec. 7 each year, Americans commemorate Pearl Harbor Day in memory of the thousands who were killed or injured when the Japanese attacked an American naval base in Hawaii that day in 1941.
The attack is frequently cited as a major turning point in World War II. In his book “Smart Power,” foreign policy expert Ted Galen Carpenter gives his take on the significance of the event. Carpenter writes:
Pearl Harbor plunged America into the maelstrom of World War II, a struggle that involved the core security interests of the republic and symbolized rival visions for the future of the planet. Japan and its allies were making a bid for dominance in their respective regions and beyond. Had they succeeded, there would have been a major shift in the global balance of power — to the extreme detriment of the United States.
According to the National Park Service‘s website:
- 2,388 Americans died in the attack
- 1,178 Americans were wounded
- 21 American ships were sunk or damaged
- 323 American aircraft were destroyed or damaged
- 1,177 Americans involved in the attack were serving on the USS Arizona
- 333 servicemen serving on the USS Arizona survived the attack
Pearl Harbor Day is not a federal holiday, but the day is often commemorated in U.S. schools. In addition, flags around the country are lowered to half-staff.
A video of survivors returning to Pearl Harbor can be found here.
We must never forget.
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I’m not willing to see 2 million Americans who stand to lose their unemployment insurance at the end of this month be put in a situation where they might lose their home or their car or suffer some additional economic catastrophe.
So said a petulant-sounding President Obama last night in a news conference in which he outlined the terms of the compromise on Bush-era tax extensions he had struck with Republican leaders and hopes to sell to his Democratic base.
The bottom line is that the tax cuts will be extended for all Americans for two years, in exchange for which taxpayers will pony up another $56 billion to cover 13 additional months of unemployment benefits for a group liberals are fond of referring to oxymoronically as jobless workers.
If the tone of the previous paragraph sounds callous, it is partly because I firmly believe the government is conditioning many of these people to become permanent wards of the state: Give a man a fish, and all that. But it is also because the Democrats’ brand of compassion extends to only about a third of “jobless workers.” It does not apply to the roughly 4 million out-of-work Americans who don’t quality for unemployment insurance because they are self-employed or hold down other nontraditional jobs.
Howard Rosen, a labor market expert with the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, has stated that, “[t]he largest group of people that do not qualify for unemployment insurance are the nontraditional employees.” These millions who are not full-time, permanent employees are simply out of luck when it comes to situations where—to borrow the president’s metric for personal financial disaster —“they might lose their home or their car or suffer some additional economic catastrophe.”
The problem resides in the antiquated Social Security Act of 1935, which encouraged states in the midst of the Great Depression to adopt unemployment insurance plans. Because the notion of nontraditional worker back then was virtually nonexistent, the laws were designed to protect only those laid off from full-time jobs.
It was in January of 2009, the same month coincidentally when President Obama passed his near-trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka stimulus plan) that Kathy Lohr of NPR wrote about one nontraditional out-of-work couple who had already begun depleting their savings accounts and retirement plans. Although little has been written about this segment of the population since, try to imagine what life has been like for them in the wake of the failed recovery. Don’t they deserve a fish, too?
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Cross-posted at Libertarian Examiner. Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.
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