You may delay, but time will not.
Benjamin Franklin
McDonald's Deserves a Break Today
One of my favorite libertarian journalists, John Stossel has a signature tagline: "Give me a break!" McDonald's had a famous jingle in the early 1970's: "You Deserve a Break Today." But in fact, McDonald's may be in need of a break--from the government attempts to meddle with a practical approach it has provided for a form of health insurance called "mini-meds" for nearly 30,000 hourly workers. These plans, operated by providers like Aetna, provide coverage for up to $10K for premiums ranging up to $32/week.
The problem has to do with arbitrary regulations ("reforms") in the new healthcare system where the bureaucrats want to force efficiency of health care dollars by ensuring a certain minimum percentage of benefits paid per premium dollar (e.g., 80-85%) and/or a certain minimal level of aggregate payments. The problem has to do with certain scalability issues; you have overhead (computing costs, back office personnel, etc.) and marketing costs which must be spread over a limited population of small aggregate premiums. It's the same kind of issue that small businesses in towns are wary about a deep-discounting WalMart competing against them.
This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when federal politicians and bureaucrats take a general heuristic about operational efficiency and start applying it out of context. (I can't think anything more hypocritical than a government running $1.4T deficits lecturing the private sector on containing expenses.) The only thing to be gained by imposing rules that make ongoing operations unprofitable is shrinking the number of remaining vendors; what do you think happens to premium costs with reduced competition? Eventually if you put in too many Draconian restrictions, you may lose an entire market niche
As usual, the progressive Democrats, including Rockefeller (D-WV), are responding to any implied challenge to the reform, with their usual attempt to intimidate the perceived opposition.
Former Senator Phil Gramm's (R-TX) Response to the Leader Whom "Saved" Us from a Second Great Depression
Phil Gramm titles his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed "Echoes of the Great Depression". He notes that, of all things, some European countries are showing higher growth and lost jobs (on a percentage basis) much less than the US after the economic tsunami. Phil Gramm notes a couple of comparisons, and these quotes are relevant I think to the problems we see today:
The war on business and wealth was so traumatic that the League of Nations' 1939 World Economic Survey attributed part of the poor U.S. economic performance to it: "The relations between the leaders of business and the Administration were uneasy, and this uneasiness accentuated the unwillingness of private enterprise to embark on further projects of capital expenditure which might have helped to sustain the economy."
As the textile innovator Lammot du Pont complained in 1937, "Uncertainty rules the tax situation, the labor situation, the monetary situation, and practically every legal condition under which industry must operate." Henry Morgenthau summarized the policy failure to the House Ways and Means Committee in April 1939: "Now, gentleman, we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work . . . I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started . . . and an enormous debt, to boot."Political Humor
This is a mock attack video from Townhall.com on Jackass of the Year winner Alan Grayson (D-FL) for his unethical desperation ad deliberately taking a snippet of a Biblical verse out of context and smearing his general election opponent Mr. Webster by linking him with the Taliban.
A few originals:
- Obama announced a hiring target of 10,000 math, science, technology, and engineering teachers. And that's just to help his Administration: Obama to keep track of how many states he's visited, Biden count the number of letters in "jobs", Geithner with his taxes, and, well, everybody in the Office of Management and Budget.
- I'm not saying that the Tea Party Express didn't vet Christine O'Donnell, but they overlooked the part on the application where she mentioned being grossed out by the hair gel scene in "There's Something About Mary", she listed Glinda as a character reference, and then there was that summons she reported from Salem, Massachusetts....
Musical Interlude: The "British Invasion" of the 1960's Series
The Rolling Stones, "Paint It Black"
