Thursday, March 25. 2010
About half of those touted by the Democrats to gain more medical care coverage will be in Medicaid.
In California, per the Los Angeles Times, that's estimated to add $3-billion to its budget spending, already $20-billion in deficit. Former Governor Moonbeam, now Attorney General, Jerry Brown, now running for an encore as governor, has not joined other states' attorney generals in challenging ObamaCare.
In South Carolina, it is estimated to add 10% to its budget spending, reports its capital's newspaper The State.
In my small California town, the PTA is urgently asking parents to kick in an extra $25-thousand to support non-core but valuable instruction slated for state funded cuts. No mention of cutting teachers' rich benefits, or the staff protected by unions from being cut by being slotted into useless holding posts. I wonder how long it'll be before my neighborhood's very involved Moms and Pops, and those elsewhere, will connect the dots.
 Michael Yon's independent dispatches from the war fronts are invaluable, and worth hitting his tip jar to support.
His latest, for example, addresses the political economics of suicide bombing:
Suicide attackers come in different “grades.” Some are illiterate, unsophisticated people, unsuited for complex targeting. A plotter could not expect to select an illiterate village boy from the hinterlands of Zabul Province to move to Florida, obtain a place to live and begin flight training to crash airplanes into buildings.
Young boys and women come cheaper, used for tactical targets. The college-educated are reserved for the more strategic. Some are strapped into locked vests or their families held hostage, but most are part of a cult.
Dogs have been trained to carry bombs to attack enemies for decades. The Soviets and others have used dogs as low-tech smart bombs. Yet canine platoons likely would rebel if they caught scent they were being duped to die.
Today, more sophisticated people employ men (mostly) to deliver bombs in Afghanistan. Gullible souls are selected, conditioned, trained and deployed. Malleable minds are identified then loaded with psychic software that uses their minds to create a vision. Evil persons of superior intellect identify the raw material—that raw material might be an engineer from a stable family—and trains them to fetch myths.
But, even cults have their limits of utility. The Taliban are Jim Jonesing themselves.
The impact of their KoolAid on Americans backfired:
There was a time when Americans seemed to view suicide attacks as a sign of the complete conviction of the enemy, an immutable dedication to their cause that many people found terrifying and cause for soul-searching. “What could we have done to provoke such anger?” Yet with time, American views of suicide attacks have matured and become more grounded....Overuse of suicide attackers does not appear to cause Americans to cower, but to evoke Americans to want to kill the perpetrator.
As it is did on Iraqis and now Afghans:
The Taliban’s efforts at repackaging themselves as kinder, gentler mass-murderers is failing. Their suicide bombing campaign is backfiring. The Taliban are losing their cool. Something is in the air. The enemy remains very deadly, yet the scent of their weakness is growing stronger while our people close in.
Wednesday, March 24. 2010
Jesse Abbate with Glock 18 on full auto:
This was an ad for a vacuum cleaner. I need one of those Rowenta vacuums:
In Keep Your Stinking Paws Off My Body and Out of My Pocket, You Damn Dirty Apes!, Gagdad Bob comes down from his double-wide cloud and begins thus:
Know what I hate? I hate it when the left drags me and everything else down to the crudest level of raw power politics, so that I can't ignore them even if I want to. The point is, real Americans mostly just want to be left alone by the State, just as they would be pleased if criminals would refrain from breaking into their cars and houses.
But just as we must take precautions against criminals and sociopaths, our well intended liberal fascists force us to take steps against them. Who would want to spend a moment thinking about the likes of Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid unless they were in your face, trying to purloin your slack? What did I ever do to them? Nothing. Indeed, I pay their salary and for their travel, retirement, and healthcare (hair plugs and botox injections included). All I ask in return is that they leave me alone.
But no, they can't do that. They can't keep their hands off my body and out of my pocketbook...
Hate-filled anti-haters. Good old Ann is a born comedienne and a mocker of the status quo - sort of my Lennie Bruce. I can't believe these jerks who have no sense of fun and who cannot take a jab.
She is having good fun with this.
$3-trillion of actual public pension liabilities on top of $trillions of actual ObamaCare costs and $trillions of ObamaCare taxes.
All private and public pension funds took a shellacking over the past few years. Tougher accounting rules are leading private pension funds to decrease risk, and thus the required contributions, by reducing their percentage of funds in stocks. Public pension funds, by contrast, are increasing the risks they are taking, to reduce voting taxpayers’ sticker shock at the unsustainable promises made to government employees.
Greenwich Associates, one of the top investment research firms, calls it a “swing-for-the-fences” attempt to avoid fiscal realities.
Public funds appear to be banking on the fact that the investment strategies they are implementing will help shore up solvency ratios by generating returns that far outpace the market. Municipal pension funds last year said they expect their investment portfolios to beat relevant benchmarks by 160 basis points — up from a 132 bps expectation in 2008. Public funds with assets of $500 million or less increased their stated expected outperformance to a staggering 180 basis points in 2009 from an already aggressive 135 bps in 2008. "These are very aggressive expectations," says Greenwich Associates consultant Chris McNickle. "Most investment managers struggle to generate the levels of outperformance expected by institutional investors; it would be rarer still for an entire portfolio to achieve that level of outperformance for any number of years." [Note: bps = 1/100th of 1%, so 180bps = 1.8%]
The American Enterprise Institute’s study says that, contrary to public pension funds’ official accounting that they are about $½-trillion in actuarial deficit, their actual deficit is closer to $3 trillion.
The problem is fundamental: According to accounting rules adopted by the states, a public sector pension plan may call itself "fully funded" even if there is a better-than-even chance it will be unable to meet its obligations….
Public pension plans are hiding behind unrealistically low deficit figures. This allows policy makers to dodge difficult choices today at the cost of a much heavier burden on taxpayers in the future.
Today’s California Field Poll cooperates in the sham. In the face of a projected $20-billion shortfall, expected to continue in future years, Californians are more likely to support budget cuts than two-years ago, but still only two areas gain even marginal majority support for cuts, prisons and parks. Notably lacking from the poll questions of areas to cut is public employee pensions.
Some states and localities are trying to make adjustments to future pension liabilities to their employees, but the adjustments are relatively minor in comparison to the burden on and cuts to other government services.
Top that off with the new huge budget burdens upon the states mandated by ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility. Fourteen states are already suing to block ObamaCare’s effects on the states. For example, the Christian Science Monitor reports:
The suit says that, under the new law, Medicaid rolls in Florida are expected to increase dramatically. The corresponding soaring costs [already 26 percent of Florida’s annual budget] will fall increasingly on the Florida treasury, but state officials will have less authority to set priorities….
The lawsuit says this amounts to an unconstitutional exercise of federal power that violates principles of federalism protected in the 10th Amendment. It says the healthcare reform bill commandeers the states and their employees as agents of the federal government’s regulatory scheme, and that it does so at the state’s own cost.
Actually, at the cost of schools, roads, policing, and other high-priority government services. The number of government employees, however, keeps increasing while the number of taxpaying workers decreases and their taxes increase.
Wake up and smell the tea.
 Science museums tamed by agendas
Re the anti-fat craze:
A world in which in many nations it is normal for the poor to be fat is a utopia by any measure from the perspective of someone who lived in 1900.
So true. That was when they had the term "prosperously plump." Now people spend thousands to try not to be plump, and the stats say the "poor" are the most plump. Why that is, I do not know. What I do know is that body lard is unattractive to me. If people want to be fat, though, it's their choice and I would never hold it against them.
Why Germany would decide to further enable Greece's socialism and corruption is beyond me. The NYT thinks they should.
Althouse: Are tea parties racist? Related: Figures. NY Times Still Pushing Bogus Tea Party N*gger Story Despite Video Proof That It Was Made Up
Conservative vs. Leftist industries in the US. h/t Chicago Boyz
Diversity training doesn't work
Amusing: Coulter to file grievance with Canadian human rights
At the time of the American Revolution
"Americans were the most prosperous people in the world, and also the lowest taxed. In fiscal terms the rebellion was inspired by ambition rather than hardship, by a desire not for financial freedom but for more financial freedom. This push for opportunity spurred people's envy of success, their scorn for failure, and their increasingly dubious view of their compatriots' integrity."
Why isn't this guy in jail?
From the Chicago Trib in As America Trots Down The Same Doomed Path, Chicago Tribune Notices Illinois Is Broke:
State government’s free-fall into insolvency was designed intentionally and executed methodically. Over the years, legislators devoted more to hoarding power and ensuring their re-election than to smart governance. They repeatedly created employee benefits, entitlement coverage and spending obligations that the people of Illinois cannot pay as costs come due.
9th Circuit nominee John Liu says he “envisions the judiciary…as a culturally situated interpreter of social meaning.” Is he a social worker, a forensic Psychiatrist, or a nut?
Image via Protein:
WSJ: Why ObamaCare makes us nostalgic for the Cold War.
Good summary of the reconciliation bill at Hennessey
Related: I am going to let 3 guys go
Mead: Why can't DC think outside the blue box?
“Already Insured? Get Ready to Pay More”
Free Viagra is in the health bill? How about penile enlargement? Every guy wants that.
In Health Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality. Duh. But not by making it easier for people to create wealth - if wealth is what they want. No, just by taking mine and giving it to somebody else, preferably to a Dem voter.
Tuesday, March 23. 2010
The best-named blog in the blogosphere is gone: "The Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid" by my friend Don Luskin.
Don got me started in blogging in October 2004, when he posted a long, documented piece by me about the Swiftboat hypocrisy of the New York Times and its then ombudsman (also erroneously called its public editor).
I just received the following two emails from Don:
#1: Bruce, after 8 years at it, I’ve made the decision to stop blogging. It was great at the beginning when blogging was new and I had a lot of time on my hands. But since then my business has expanded dramatically, and I now have media platforms with the WSJ, NRO, SmartMoney and CNBC. Also, Google has announced various technology changes to the software that would require a lot of work to adapt to, so I just decided to let it go.
#2: [Reply to what happens to the blog name]: I guess if someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse then I wouldn’t refuse, but…
Don Luskin (bio) knows a thing or three about making money.
The bidding is open. Or, will Don contribute the proceeds to a cause that works to end the Conspiracy? Or, will Don designate a heir?
There’s no replacing Don Luskin’s blog. But, there is carrying on to end the Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid. The conservative and libertarian sides of the blogosphere have come a long way forward over the past years, so I can see Don’s logic, always sound. But while losing Don, his contributions have been seminal. Thank you Don.
 "The Bully State." That is the perfect term.
Sort of related: Healthy Community Initiatives: A Microcosm of What We're In For
Some pundits have said that Obamacare completes the welfare state project begun back in the Progressive era and by FDR and Johnson. Does that mean there is nothing else they want to do?
Cobb has a message for black male youth. h/t, Vandy. I wonder whether Cobb appreciates that his message is for everybody (he probably does).
Federal efforts on education do not work. Of course not.
Explain to me why anyone would equate racism with being opposed to goverment medical care.
Google vs. China
Guardian admits wind causing Arctic ice loss
Sharpton: “Americans Overwhelmingly Voted For Socialism When They Elected Obama”
British Wind Farms Failing Due to Lack of Wind. I have an idea for all those bird-chopper wind machines: Plug them all into a power source and use them as fans to cool the rapidly baking planet.
No chance that courts will strike down individual mandates. I agree. "Commerce" has come to mean anything.
Repeal is hokum. Sad to say, I agree. Adjustments possible, but repeal will not happen.
Krauthammer has it right:
"We are on our way, there is absolutely no chance we are not going to end up with national health care."
And Krauthammer said our system will soon look like the one in the United Kingdom and in Canada.
"This is nationalizing health care, the insurance companies are now utilities, they are contractors," Krauthammer said. the government makes all of these decisions, only a matter of time and will probably happen after the Obama administration. But he will be remembered as the father of national health care as they have in Canada or Britain and it starts tonight.
Lowry: Dem win is built on sand
Zomblog: The real reasons Americans hate government healthcare
Monday, March 22. 2010
So much for President Obama’s virtual colonoscopy, not approved as cost-effective for ordinary folks’ coverage. But, then Obama would have had to been out during a routine colonoscopy and VP Biden would have been President for an hour or two. Imagine how much worse that would have been! Senator Grassley tries to set matters right.
Grassley said, “It’s only fair and logical that top administration officials, who fought so hard for passage of this overhaul of America’s health care system, experience it themselves. If it’s as good as promised, they’ll know it first-hand. If there are problems, they’ll be able to really understand them, as they should.”
Grassley said the motivation for his amendments is simple: public officials who make the laws or lead efforts to have laws changed should live under those laws.
“This is the same principle that motivated me to pursue legislation over 20 years ago to apply civil rights, labor and employment laws to Congress,” Grassley said. Before President Clinton signed into law Grassley’s long-sought Congressional Accountability Act of 1995, Congress had routinely exempted itself.
The senior Congressional Committee and leadership staff who wrote the ObamaCare bills are also exempt from it.
We have experienced one more giant step towards becoming a boring, worn-out, lazy, demoralized and weary European-style welfare state.
VDH at Pajamas begins:
President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan.
We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from milking the system for billions. And we don’t want to address in any meaningful way the individual’s responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and chronic health procedures.
No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law.
And the smart and savvy Paul Ryan predicts the future. One quote:
What about the practical consequences of Obamacare? “Soon, we’ll see individual-market insurance companies go out of business and dump their people,” Ryan says. “Tax increases on capital are going to hurt the economy in 2011. These arbitrary Medicare cuts will adversely affect the providers and therefore their beneficiaries. You’ll have the Internal Revenue Service beefing up its enforcement of this new mandate, which people have no clue is coming. And you’re going to have employers dump employees in this exchange once it’s up and running — funneling everyone into a government-run rationing system. Then we’ll see a big spike in insurance rates, and the Democrats are going to wager that they can just blame the insurers for that, and therefore that means they will need to institute insurance price controls or have a public option. Our side is going to say, ‘Look at what you just did to ruin our health-care system,’ and focus on repeal.”
Same for me, Coyote: My Health Insurance Policy Just Became Illegal
From Steyn's "Deemocracy" in Action:
Investor's Business Daily argues that the "health" debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to its poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has "too much power." Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they're living with the consequences.
Part of the fun in reading Steyn is imagining his voice speaking it. He writes like he talks.
If you've been away this weekend, please scroll down and catch up with Maggie's. Some good stuff there.
Steyn: Happy Dependence Day!
WSJ:
While the passage of ObamaCare marks a liberal triumph, its impact will play out over many years. We fought this bill so vigorously because we have studied government health care in other countries, and the results include much higher taxes, slower economic growth and worse medical care. As for the politics, the first verdict arrives in November.
Viking:
This country's inability to address runaway entitlement spending has left us with nearly $108 trillion in unfunded liabilities. These are promises the government cannot possibly meet but there is no political will to tell Americans they can't have their ice cream. Now we're about to dramatically expand the role of government at the very moment in time when we should be shrinking it.
It's mortifying.
Devastating non-trends in US Climate
Coulter: I was hoping for a fruit basket, not a threat to prosecute
Sunday, March 21. 2010
Our fathers and mothers, or grandfathers and grandmothers, were the “greatest generation” that took the world back from tyranny in WWII and from poverty after. Ask them, and they were just doing what was right.
Those who served in Vietnam and those who supported us took the world back from despair and, vets actually doing better than their age peers, built the prosperity of the ‘80s and ‘90s. We were just doing what was right.
Now, three generations who just did what was right will be joining with the next generation to just do what’s right.
Together, in the chilling dawn of the wake-up call that is the bankrupting powergrab sham that is ObamaCare and the sliming of integrity with which it has been pressed, with the abandonment of allies and the kowtowing to foes, the heavy prices will fall most upon them along with the rest of us.
“Damn Dems” will be the next greatest generation’s battle cry. A cross-generational battle cry.
BTW
This reminds me of this: It's not over 'til we say so.
Flag of the Resistance:
Inside the Pelosi Sausage Factory:
Never before has the average American been treated to such a live-action view of the sordid politics necessary to push a deeply flawed bill to completion. It was dirty deals, open threats, broken promises and disregard for democracy that pulled ObamaCare to this point, and yesterday the same machinations pushed it across the finish line.
NYTs Understated: Legal and Political Fights Are Looming for Democrats
Am Thinker: Is Obama the new FDR?
Let's hope not, because he got everything worng.
Saturday, March 20. 2010
By its built-in logic, Obamacare will cause the health care industry to go bankrupt within months.
This is entirely deliberate, and straight from the playbook: make such a mess that people beg for government help.
Epigenetics: The limits of Darwinian evolution
Coburn: We won't permit deals for jobs for pols. Related: Lose the battle but win the war
Putin showing no respect for the O Admin
Van Jones: Tell me again - why is he at Princeton?
GOP candidate recruitment at Powerline:
A remarkable 31 of these candidates come from the medical professions, and 24 are doctors. Too bad the Democrats aren't trying to socialize the legal industry. Then lawyers would switch to the Republicans en masse, and return the GOP to its former glory.
AmeriCorps: Obama’s Scandal-Plagued Indoctrination Machine. Related: Admin restores full funding to ACORN
Human shields: Jules
Is this legal? Imagine if Bush...
Friday, March 19. 2010
Liberals and atheists are "more evolved." Everybody knew that already, didn't they? We ignorant uneddicated knuckle-dragging throwbacks nonetheless persist in clinging to Jesus and our firearms. Why they let we Neanderthals vote and have websites is beyond me.
Just like Crichton's novel: Warming goes on trial. It could be another Scopes trial: The warming religion vs. skeptical science
 - The problem with socialist solutions is always that there isn't quite enough socialism (or enuf $)
- How Obamacare screws the middle class
- 65% say Do nothing or Start Over
- Virginia: If you ram healthcare through, we'll see you in court next week
- People want coverage of pre-existing conditions, but they don't want to pay for it. So who do they want to pay for it?
Thursday, March 18. 2010
The Democrats are exultant over the preliminary CBO score (preliminary because even the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t had time to examine whether it jives with the previous Senate bill) issued this morning. The score (costing) is on the Democrats’ reconciliation adjustments to the Senate ObamaCare bill that it remains under $1-trillion in spending and that together with added revenues will further reduce the deficit.
There’s increasing amazement at this bald-faced assertion. The real score will be seen this weekend in the Democrats' trickery vote and the consequences they face next November.
The Republican leadership is still trying to decipher the fine print, but are quickly getting to the bottom line. Senator McConnell issued a press release saying: “They get there with even higher taxes and deeper Medicare cuts than the first Senate bill.
“Let’s start with Medicare cuts.
“The Senate bill that Speaker Pelosi said Democrats are so afraid to take a vote on cut Medicare by $465 billion.“This latest bill increases those cuts by about $60 billion more.
“How about taxes?
“The Senate bill that Democrats are so afraid to take a vote on raises taxes by $494 billion.
“This bill increases those tax hikes by at least $150 billion.
“So if you were worried about raising taxes in the middle of a recession, this bill raises taxes even more.
“If you were worried about cutting Medicare for seniors, this bill cuts it even more.
That’s real. There’s more that’s real and unreal. The $500-billion taken from Medicare is real in its impact on seniors' health. That doctors will have their fees further reduced is not real, many already operating at a loss on Medicare business and losses being shifted on to private insurance plans. The tens of billions of spending in future years mandated upon the already near-bankrupt states for expanded Medicaid is real, though not counted by CBO. The negative impacts on employment and the economy are real.
The Washington Post’s WonkRoom says:
One of the most stunning numerical changes is in the excise tax on Cadillac plans. While the bill changes the indexing from inflation plus 1 to inflation — strengthening the provision [ed: meaning another buy-off to unions] — it pushes back the entire effort to 2018 and significantly raises the thresholds. I suspect the bill makes up the difference with the payroll tax and the savings from the college loan provisions. More to come.
The Washington Post reports on throwing into the unrelated health care bill the entirely unrelated federal takeover (except for Democrat Senator Conrad’s state) of student loan lending:
The legislation would also spread some savings among other Democratic education priorities and reduce the deficit by $10 billion over 10 years.
On the Cadillac Tax, the New York Times reports:
Mr. Obama and White House officials reached a deal with organized labor groups to delay the implementation and limit the impact of that tax. As a result, the excise tax will raise only $32 billion over 10 years, according to the budget office.
Of course, that meant coming up with another $118 billion elsewhere to plug the hole. Not a problem: the final legislation imposes a 3.8 percent tax on “unearned income” such as dividends and interest, or on regular income above $200,000 a year for individuals and $250,000 for couples.
The National Taxpayers Union says:
On page 8 of the report (found here) the CBO lists a quick add up of the kinds of new taxes and penalties they believe the American people will be facing in the next decade should this legislation pass. Turns out by 2019, this bill would be responsible for an additional 145 billion in taxes and penalties. Of which, 17 billion will be penalties paid by the uninsured (read: people making under $250,000) and 52 billion will be penalties paid by employers. Imagine trying to job hunt then! Whats more, thats really only a 6 year estimate because the politicians who crafted the bill wanted to make sure no new taxes were put in place before they had to face re-election. Which means a ten year score (2014-2024) of the taxes and penalties would be significantly higher.
Page 24 of today’s preliminary CBO score says that $129.7 billion will be taken from Medicare Advantage plans, versus the $118.1 billion the CBO said a week ago would be taken away.
Then there’s the timing shenanigan of loading revenues up front and costs at the backend of the first 10-years.
What else lurks in the hearts of the Democrats rammming down a non-roll call vote they are planning for this weekend? Will a stake be driven through it?
P.S.: Federal budgets expert Keith Hennessey adds much more info.
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