Love will find a way.
Indifference will find an excuse.
Author unknown
Hell Freezes Over: A Democrat Gets It Right
Calling deficits "a cancer" Bowles says the country must work to improve its fiscal health. "If you take last year 100 percent of the revenue that came into the country, every nickel, every single dollar that came into the country last year was spent on our mandatory spending and interest on the debt," Bowles says.
"Mandatory spending is principally the entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. What that means is every single dollar that we spent last year on these two wars, national defense, homeland security, education, infrastructure, high value-added research, every single dollar was borrowed and half of it was borrowed from foreign countries," Bowles adds. "That is crazy. It's a formula for failure in any organization."We again have political analysis paralysis which can probably only be fixed by voters this fall turning control of the Congress and Presidency to the GOP. I'm not saying this as a GOP shill; I think the voters understand that they have effectively given the Democrats de facto control of the government over the past 4 years, and they thrown every spending and regulatory weapon they have at the economy, not to mention an accommodating Federal Reserve with near-zero interest rates, and we have the weakest, most jobless recovery since the Depression. Is the electorate really going to sustain the current leadership? I think they have to make the change. I don't care what the polls say today; besides, I think it's far more likely that news until the election will tend to be bad, not good, for Obama. I see voters dissatisfied with the direction of the country, at least two pollsters indicating an edge for the GOP in generic ballots, Obama's approval ratings seem to face resistance near 50%, bouncing down to the mid-40's. For weeks now, Romney has been essentially deadlocked in the polls with Obama, far better than Reagan was doing in the summer of 1980. The political sites are buzzing about prominent Democrats skipping the Dem national convention, and few Democratic politicians in purple/red states want to be seen with Obama on the campaign trail. The likelihood that Obama will have coattails and drag several Democrats into Congress with him seems at best remote.
The latest dance involves Bush Tax Cut Showdown II, a repeat of the lame duck politics in 2010. The Dems will try to make the class warfare argument an election issue, but I've already seen a poll indicating that at least three-quarters of American voters aren't bothered by Romney's business fortune. This is ideological; it has little to do with closing the deficit: there aren't enough rich people to do that. Whereas the Democrats demagogue, pointing out the GOP Presidential hopefuls, mindful of what happened to Reagan and GHW Bush agreeing to tax hikes but then the Dems backing out of spending cuts, are wary about committing to any tax hike regardless of spending cuts, the Republicans definitely are not Charlie Brown naively believing that Lucy will hold the football for him a third time. Obama has not put a credible offer of spending cuts on the table. (I could see a compromise where the Republicans might accept some limits to tax credits or deductions in exchange for some things the GOP wants (e.g., a variety of program cuts, Keystone Pipeline approval, etc.), but the fact of life is that they hold a stronger hand than in 2010; the chance that the House will agree to a class warfare tax is zero.) I think the President is posturing in a rather transparent bid to rally his troops to the polls.
There are a number of Dem Senators on the bubble, in tough reelection fights (e.g., Manchin, Tester, McCaskill, etc.), and Lieberman has said that he wants more of a grand bargain on taxes and spending than either of the parties' competing proposals.
I am a pragmatist; I have outlined a number of my preferences in past posts, but just a few items on the top of my wishlist: (1) inflation adjustment to capital gains income and elimination of double taxation on distributed income; (2) a more balanced federal revenue in the form of a VAT-style/consumption tax; (3) flattening of business and individual income tax rates, substituting tax credits for deductions and means-based caps on any federal subsidies. I think we need to streamline various misguided federal incentives and take a serious look at eliminating or at least capping mortgage interest and employee benefit deductions. I believe that we need to find a way of delivering federal senior entitlements, with deregulated, delegated (e.g., state-administered), or (preferably) privatized alternatives; one step is to flatten benefits and cap monthly and lifetime benefits in federal transfer payments for financially able beneficiaries.
Sunday Talk Soup: John Boehner and ObamaCare
I'm catching up on my podcast backlog, and I'm annoyed at the one-sided questioning by program moderators, and unchecked (at least for progressive politicians) interviewee political spin. So I'll probably do an ongoing series of interview markups, starting with excerpts from a Face the Nation interview that occurred during my power outage, between substitute moderator Norah O'Donnell and the Speaker of the House, occurring in the wake of the ill-considered John Roberts' decision on ObamaCare:
NORAH O'DONNELL: Good morning again. The big news came this week when the Supreme Court decided to uphold the President's signature achievement, his Affordable Care Act, including its most controversial element, the individual mandate, which requires people to buy health insurance or pay a penalty.Already O'Donnell is wrong on her framing of the issue. John Roberts joined the 4 dissenting judges in saying that the Commerce Clause doesn't apply, i.e., a penalty for NOT engaging in market transactions. What he said was that the Congress could use its broad tax authority. In other words, ObamaCare is an optional tax you can pay in lieu of participating in the perverse rigged insurance market under federal oversight. Roberts also said that this tax is bounded in magnitude,i.e., the tax-and-spend Democrats are forbidden from raising the tax to the extent the person is paying the equivalent of premiums under their rigged system.
There are other parts of the tax penalty which others, like O'Donnell, fail to point out. The fact is that the federal government already heavily subsidizes employer-based health benefits by not taxing the relevant income used to purchase it. Others have to pay it outside the employer system. If we look at health insurance at the policyholder's tax rate (at various levels, payroll, federal ,state, local), the tax subsidy can amount to almost half the cost of insurance. The status quo is unfair since the tax subsidy depends on working for a relevant employer and the tax benefit is regressive in nature (i.e., higher-income workers with company-sponsored health get more tax relief applied against policy price).
To many people, paying the tax/penalty is much cheaper than buying insurance. It really doesn't address the actuarial reasons behind a mandate, since the uninsured person is still guaranteed health care.
What is obvious, and O'Donnell fails to acknowledge, is that government is the problem, not part of the solution. What we really need to do restore the free market to health care--get away with subsidies, price fixing, rules and regulations, etc., distorting the marketplace.
NORAH O'DONNELL: The House has already voted some thirty times to repeal or defund this law. What's one more time going to do?
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: It's-- we want to show people we are resolved to get rid of this.This is a stupid question, and the Speaker points out the obvious: this is all about posturing for this fall's election, because the Senate and the White House are still held by the same people whom passed ObamaCare. A better response, in my judgment, would have been: "ObamaCare has been been in the courts since its passage. Until SCOTUS ruled, we didn't know what, if any, parts of the law would survive. Circumstances have changed: SCOTUS has decided that ObamaCare is based on tax authority, and all tax legislation by the Constitution starts in the House."
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: Well, because that's what elections are for. NORAH O'DONNELL: But the truth is you say Mitt Romney would work to repeal this he says on day one. But don't you need a Republican Senate with a supermajority in order to get rid of it?In fact, O'Donnell is making a point I've already made: I've repeatedly pointed out in the blog that if and when Romney beats Obama, and the party control of the Senate flips, the Senate will almost certainly retain a minority with the ability to filibuster. What I didn't discuss is the unspoken truth of how the Democrats worked around Scott Brown's filibuster-sustaining vote in the Senate: through the Byrd rule and the budget reconciliation process: the same process can seriously cripple ObamaCare if and of itself. Second, the nature of the election will influence what Romney and Boehner can do: a number of vulnerable Democratic Senate seats (e.g., Alaska and Virginia) are on the table in 2014. Third, the responses of the states, now freed to waive the federal Medicaid eligibility increases and/or refuse to set up exchanges, will greatly influence the future of ObamaCare.
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: We-- we-- we will not flinch from our resolve to get-- make sure this law is repealed in its entirety.
I suspect that Romney and new Senate Majority Leader McConnell will attempt to broker some face-saving compromise deal with enough vulnerable Senate Democrats to get a filibuster-proof coalition. I can only speculate what that might consist of: my suggestions have been to focus on some policy mix of catastrophic health insurance, deregulated interstate insurance pools (including hedged self-insurance), and state/regional high risk pools, with federal funding (Medicaid-like cost sharing?) of subsidies by some broad-based consumption tax.
NORAH O'DONNELL: Is there anything good in this law?Loaded rhetorical question. How does CBS News train its reporters? With "DailyKos for Dummies"? In the whole interview, I find nothing original and interesting, just a rehash of predictable progressive media and Obama Administration talking points and gotcha questions.
You mean besides the fact that existing federal meddling with the free market system is exacerbating the inflation-bound sector and the Democrats' kaleidoscope accounting vastly underestimates the program's costs at a time we already have unsustainable federal spending? No, the oxymoronic "Affordable Care Act" is a state of denial that pretends that bureaucrats can suddenly manage what they haven't been able to manage in four decades of federal mismanagement of Medicaid and Medicare, both of which are largely subsidized by the unsustainable shrinking private sector of health insurance. If the government still has problems with the banking industry after centuries of regulation, and if the government can't even manage its own budget, never mind any other sector, by what hubris does it believe it can swallow the health care sector, faced with an aging population and their intrinsically higher health costs?
NORAH O'DONNELL: I asked ask you if there's anything good in it because I want to ask you about some of the specific provisions in the bill. Since you are going to be repealing it, are you willing to roll back the provisions that would provide free mammograms under Medicare?
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: Listen, there are a lot of provisions that can be replaced. Remember, I said, we want to take a common-sense, step-by-step approach to replacing Obamacare.Expletive deleted. The only thing as bad a delusional progressive actually believing that you can get something for free is a conservative not calling her on it. What makes it even worse is that the Speaker doesn't even address the perversity of using insurance to cover out of pocket expenses. The Speaker, for instance here, doesn't point out that there are issues with false positives and there are good reasons to believe it is only necessary every other year after a certain age, but here's one estimate I grabbed out of a brief Internet search:
Mammogram prices can vary widely depending on the exact test, number of views, your location and whether you choose to go to an outpatient facility or a hospital. Our research shows an average cost of about $100 for a mammogram study with prices ranging from $75 to over $200This amounts to the equivalent of about a movie ticket or a pizza every month. In the context of an insurance premium that amounts to hundreds or even thousands a month. Lab equipment for doing mammograms is not free, and certainly the provider pays money for the time of medical personnel involved with the procedure. Costs are like squeezing a balloon (spreading the cost elsewhere). A "free" procedure is simply redistributed through provider charges in a less obvious manner. This is actually a perverse piece of economics because women who do not need the procedure, at least on an annual basis, may use it because they've been told it's "free". In reality, it exacerbates inflationary pressures in a stealth manner! We can go on down the list of "closed doughnut holes" in prescription drug benefits, maintaining adult children on policies: does anyone really believe that adult children are "free"? If adult children are "free", why not add other friends and family? Those costs are subsidized by all the policyholders.
I longed to hear Boehner distance himself from dysfunctional public sector regulation of the health care sector. I want to hear something different than "our federal intervention is better than their federal intervention": we need to return to the basics of the free market. Health care, education, etc., are not "special cases" exempt from the laws of economics: the Invisible Hand that Adam Smith saw handles ALL markets equally well.
Milos Forman, "Obama the Socialist? Not Even Close":
Thumbs DOWN!
Before proceeding my commentary on this (you can find other libertarian takes here and here), this is a question I specifically addressed almost 4 years ago in the blog:
Obama isn't a socialist (or Marxist); for example, he's not calling for nationalizing health care (but working with existing company-sponosored health insurance), and he's talking about capital gains cuts for small business. However, he is a social liberal; social liberalism differs from classical liberalism by its focus on collectivism vs. individualism.Thus, I believe that the Czech-born Oscar-winning movie director is quite correct in rebuking the media conservatives:
I hear the word “socialist” being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Obama, they warn, is a socialist.But I think he's attacking a straw man here:
They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism.Since Forman is making an issue of media conservative language, let us for a moment look at Forman's own consistency here: he concedes the existence of a "Western European-style socialism", but when GOP or media conservatives say Obama is a socialist, Forman seems to think they are obviously referring not to Western European-style socialism but Iron Curtain-style totalitarianism. (In fact, the media conservatives explicitly refer to nationalized health care in Canada, Britain and Western Europe, versus the health care systems in the former USSR and Red China.) Forman probably meant to say European-style social liberalism or social democrats, not socialism.
So is Forman suggesting that he's upset at media conservatives comparing Obama to a Western European politician? Clearly not. The majority of his opinion is trying to tell us that we don't know how good we have it compared to the perverted implementation of socialism that existed behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
I have consistently criticized media conservatives in this blog for their use of language, but I do think they are onto something but just using the wrong terminology. Obama and his cronies don't need to directly own businesses if they can intimidate business in a centrally planned economy. In a past post, I referenced Austrian School economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo's outstanding essay "Economic Fascism". So even though Obama is very good at soft-selling his policies, exploiting the hidden nature of his stealth expansion in expanding government scope into everyday life, all we are doing (using today's jargon of user interfaces) is changing the skin (or appearance) of federal intervention into the economy.
Perhaps Forman doesn't realize that the very same Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama he's implicitly exonerating (in the process of condemning Obama's critics) has had no problem with expanding drone/bombing runs over nations with which we don't have a declared war or of killing American-born clerics without due process, if he suspects that they are aiding and abetting alleged terrorists; he signed into law a Patriot Act which is in essence an expansion of central authority at the expense of individual liberty. The same Obama is hiring an army of IRS agents to enforce his ObamaCare monstrosity; do you think any American citizen is not apprehensive over being scrutinized by the IRS? You have FDA SWAT teams invading dairy farms trying to sell safe raw milk products, other SWAT (DEA) teams forcing their way into the wrong house, causing extensive property damage and terrorizing innocent families.
Yes, there is no doubt that "kinder, gentler" Barack Obama does not employ the same tactics of a brutal repressive regime like those of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein. Perhaps some authoritarians try to mask their personal agenda by presenting a pseudo-ideological cover for their actions. Maybe Obama is a true believer in his professed political ideology.
It doesn't matter what you call Barack Obama or his political cronies: I call him a social liberal. I get annoyed by people whom use the term "socialism" without doing due diligence on the subject of political ideologies. But I'm looking beyond the surface of the words people use; I'm looking at what is motivating them to call him a socialist. Obama comes from a party that has called for nationalizing health care or at least providing a "public option". (Such a fair fight: competing against a private-sector company which faces constraints that the federal government doesn't have to do, like living within a budget and not being able to print money.)
I think that Mr. Forman needs to direct a new picture, of how the Greeks ended the Trojan War, i.e., via a Trojan horse. For example, Barack Obama gifted the nation with ObamaCare. And Pelosi gave us a subtle hint when she said that we had to pass the bill to find out what's in it....
The House Votes to Repeal ObamaCare: 244-185:
Thumbs UP!
The House repeal was bipartisan (as was the original House vote against ObamaCare), although as I mentioned in an earlier post and above, this is mostly a symbolic move because the President would veto the measure even if the Democratic majority which passed the
The Democratic shills have absurdly attempted to suggest that the opposition to ObamaCare has dissipated in the aftermath of the bizarre SCOTUS ruling. This is wishful thinking. I looked carefully at polls following the ruling, and John Roberts' idiosyncratic opinion doesn't convince anyone on the bubble: the SCOTUS decision basically expands federal authority at the expense of individual liberty. Opposition to ObamaCare has remained constant, and even if there was a SCOTUS bump, it's temporary. Some are rationalizing it in different ways, e.g., people are dissatisfied because they want an even stronger bill, etc. This is pure fantasy. Right now about 85% of people are covered by some insurance plan, and they haven't really seen the impact of ObamaCare. Just wait until some companies decide that it's cheaper to simply pay the "taxes" than provide the benefit, and employees find themselves buying coverage in this rigged exchange. The real costs really won't come to surface for a few years; just imagine voters whom discover that this sales pitch of the government managing health care better than the private sector wasn't worth the paper their voting ballot was printed on, and they bought into the health care cost bubble. Just imagine 1001 birth control type issue kerfuffles escalating over the years ahead.
Those of us committed to liberty say, "We have just begun to fight". This atrocity and its enabling by a dysfunctional, split Supreme Court WILL NOT STAND. We will divert traffic away from the progressive march down the road to serfdom.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Who, "Pinball Wizard". With all due respect, I prefer Elton John's remake: he proved himself to be among the finest rock vocalists ever with his performance here.
