Op-Eds and Editorials June '09
Taxes Or Growth?
Originally Posted At Investor's Business Daily
June 30, 2009
The White House now refuses to rule out raising taxes on the middle class. Meanwhile, a top finance official in the previous Democratic White House suggests a tax hike is all but inevitable. Are we being set up? It sure looks that way. And if it happens, you can mark it down: The economy will slow to a crawl and may even relapse into a deep recession. This is a complete reversal of what was promised.
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Does Obama Care?
Originally Posted At The American Spectator
By Lawrence A. Hunter
June 29, 2009
At a town hall meeting in the White House last week, a woman told President Obama about her 105-year-old mother Hazel Homer who had a pacemaker implanted five years ago after first being denied the procedure because she was "too old." When the heart specialist was shown how vibrant and active this Centenarian was, that decision was reversed, and the woman is still alive today because she received her pacemaker, something that never would have happened under the kind of government-run healthcare President Obama envisions for America.
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Obama's Health Future
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
June 29, 2009
President Obama's TV health-care forum on Wednesday evening was useful, because revealing. Namely, Mr. Obama shared more than he probably intended about the kind of rationing that his health plan will inevitably impose.
At one point in the town hall, broadcast from the East Room by ABC news, a woman named Jane Sturm told the story of her 105-year-old mother, who, at 100, was told by an arrhythmia specialist that she was too old for a pacemaker. She ended up getting a second option, and the operation, for which Ms. Sturm credits her survival.
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Obama Ran A Capitalist Campaign
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By Bret Swanson
Posted June 29, 2009
Posted By Source November, '08
Opting out of monopolistic, closed or centralized systems is often the path to innovation. Sometimes we opt out through the relaxation of regulations. More often, technology allows us to leap, obliterate or ignore the obstacles altogether...
If Barack Obama ran for president by calling for a heavier hand of government, he also won by running one of the most entrepreneurial campaigns in history. Will he now grasp the lesson his campaign offers as he crafts policies aimed at reigniting the national economy? Amid a recession, two wars, and a global financial crisis, will he come to see that unleashing the entrepreneur is the best way to raise the revenue he needs for his lofty priorities?
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A Health 'Reform' To Regret
Originally Posted At The Washington Post
By George F. Will
June 28, 2009
"In the beginning," says a character in a Peter De Vries novel, "the earth was without form and void. Why didn't they leave well enough alone?" When Washington is finished improving health care, Americans may be asking the same thing. Certainly the debate will compel them to think more clearly about this subject. Most Americans do want different health care: They want 2009 medicine at 1960 prices. Americans spent much less on health care in 1960 (5 percent of gross domestic product as opposed to 18 percent now).
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On Health Care, Obama’s Dirty Secret
Originally Posted At The National Review
By Rick Lowry
June 26, 2009
Pres. Barack Obama knows health-care policy. Give him an hour and a half to hold forth, as ABC News obligingly did at a town-hall meeting, and he will invariably impress with his fluidity.
This makes it all the more remarkable that he often appears unable to understand how his health-care program threatens private insurance. At a recent press conference, Obama argued that the very notion of it doesn’t compute: “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best-quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government — which they say can’t run anything — suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.”
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Obamacare Not As Easy As ABC
Originally Posted At OC Register
By Jay Ambrose
June 26, 2009
During ABC's health-care session with Barack Obama the other night, our charming, articulate, exceedingly clever president essentially repeated the same answer to all the questions in roughly the same way.
Leave the system alone and it will deteriorate, he said. Sure, there are some questions and problems with what we plan to do. But there has already been plenty of debate. We know what the best answers are. We are going to phase this thing in and it will be pretty much OK in the end.
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Divided We Stand
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By PAUL STAROBIN
June 24, 2009
Remember that classic Beatles riff of the 1960s: “You say you want a revolution?” Imagine this instead: a devolution. Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society.
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Is Government Health Care Constitutional?
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By David Rivkin Jr. and Lee Casey
June 22, 2009
Is a government-dominated health-care system unconstitutional? A strong case can be made for that proposition, based on the same "right to privacy" that underlies such landmark Supreme Court decisions as Roe v. Wade.
The details of this year's health-care reform bill are still being hammered out. But the end result is sure to be byzantine in complexity. Washington will have immense say over how, when and through whom Americans are treated. Moreover, despite the administration's public pronouncements about painless cuts in wasteful spending, only the most credulous believe that some form of government-directed health-care rationing can be avoided as a means of controlling costs.
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We Don't Need Radical Health Care Reform
Originally Posted At Real Clear Politics
By George Will
June 21, 2009
WASHINGTON -- To dissect today's health care debate, the crux of which concerns a "public option," use the mind's equivalent of a surgeon's scalpel, Occam's razor, a principle of intellectual parsimony: In solving a puzzle, start with the simplest explanatory theory... The unifying constant of his [Obama’s] domestic policies -- their connecting thread -- is that they advance the Democrats' dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government for more and more things
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Making Sense: Nationalized Health Care And The Tax Shuffle
Originally Posted At The Washington Examiner
By Michael Reagan
June 20, 2009
Last week, I wrote about the serious risks which older Americans and those seriously or terminally ill face in the so-called "efficiencies" which President Obama and congressional Democrats say will fund a large part of their health care plans. These "efficiencies" can only refer to reallocating doctors, hospital care, drugs and surgeries away from older and ill Americans where it is "wasted" because we will probably pass away sooner than younger and healthier people.
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Health Care Debate Gets Dose Of Reality
Originally Posted At AL.com
June 19, 2009
SINCE THE creation of Medicare more than 40 years ago, members of Congress have talked continually about how they're going to control health care costs and "pay for" new benefits.
So it's no surprise that, once again, a huge new federal health care entitlement is being promoted as a cost-effective program that will control inflation and thus almost pay for itself.
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Medical Analysis By Milton Friedman
Originally Posted At Forbes
By Peter Robinson
June 19, 2009
President Obama, the press, all the Democrats and a fair number of the Republicans in Congress share the same assumption about health care. Whatever you believe should be done about the problem, it sure is complicated. Yet one man figured it out.
In 2001 the economist Milton Friedman read up on health care, discovered that the inefficiencies in our system trace back to a single policy mistake, worked out a policy test that would help us correct it and then described his findings in a few thousand words of plain English.
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'Public Option': Son Of Medicaid
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By Daniel Henninger
June 18, 2009
The reform known as Medicaid is worth our attention now because Mr. Obama is more or less demanding that the nation accept another reform, his "optional" federalized health insurance program. . .[Medicaid] more than any other factor has put California and New York on the brink of fiscal catastrophe. . . After 45 years, the health-care reform called Medicaid has crushed state budgets...
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Government Grinds The Gears
Originally Posted At The Washington Times
By Richard W. Rahn
June 18, 2009
Congress is pushing to create a federal government national health care provider that is supposed to operate in competition with private health care companies. Anyone who thinks the government would operate such a company competently, efficiently and fairly is ignoring 200 years of history. Without a doubt, it will engage in health care rationing, create an expensive and bloated bureaucracy, provide poorer service, stifle innovation and seek to repress its more efficient and preferred private competitors.
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The High Cost Of ObamaCare
Americans wisely rejected HillaryCare. ObamaCare is the same poison, different bottle.
Originally Posted At The National Review
By Lawrence A. Hunter
June 17, 2009
President Obama spoke to the American Medical Association yesterday and repeated the same platitudes and promises he has been uttering ever since the presidential campaign. What he did not explain, however, is how he intends to square the circle of providing universal, top-quality health care for everyone without imposing health-care rationing, without raising taxes on the middle class, and without blowing another trillion-dollar hole in the budget.
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Federal Intervention Pits 'Gets' Vs. 'Get-Nots'
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By Bob David and Jon Hilsenrath
June 15, 2009
HAMBURG, Pa. -- Factory worker Dennis Davis recently stopped at the Cabela's store here to buy a $90 carrying case for the long-barreled Contender pistol he uses to shoot pesky groundhogs at his brother's farm. He paid with a store-issued credit card.
The U.S. government helped finance the transaction. Earlier this year, it recharged the credit-card operations of the Nebraska-based retailer of hunting and camping gear with nearly $400 million of federal financing.
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Watch For Hidden Taxes
Originally Posted At The Boston Globe
By Susan Dudley and Jeff Rosen
June 12, 2009
THE OBAMA administration's macroeconomic policies to "stimulate" the economy have been unprecedented and visible, costing Americans in the trillions, including $787 billion for the "stimulus," a $410 billion "omnibus" spending package (on top of last September's $800 billion "minibus" spending), and another $600 billion or more for the financial bailout, over and above all the automatic federal entitlement spending. In addition, even ignoring this year of "stimulus" spending, the president's proposed budget for fiscal year 2010 would increase annual spending from $3 trillion last year to $3.6 trillion next year, while adding more to the federal debt in the president's first two years than the prior eight years combined.
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'False Hopes, Empty Illusions'
Originally Posted At USA Today
By Tom Miller
June 12, 2009
The political case for an individual insurance mandate is built on false hopes, empty illusions and larger agendas.
Support primarily comes from people who already purchase or offer insurance and naively hope it would make someone else pay more, while they'd pay less. Many politicians also want to substitute mandated private funds for the taxes they would otherwise find hard to impose to meet their goals. Some employers support an individual mandate as a way to avoid enactment of an employer coverage mandate. Providers of medical services hope that a mandate would pay more of their bills.
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Mobile Press Register
June 10, 2009
In Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," Mark Antony prepares to address a crowd that has gathered around Caesar's body. Brutus has already spoken rationally in defense of Caesar's assassination. The crowd still wants to understand more. Mark Antony eloquently appeals to the emotions of the crowd. With Antony's speech in mind, I offer this adaptation:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ear.
I come to bury Georgus, not praise him.
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Get Ready For Inflation And Higher Interest Rates
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By ARTHUR B. LAFFER
June 10, 2009
Rahm Emanuel was only giving voice to widespread political wisdom when he said that a crisis should never be "wasted." Crises enable vastly accelerated political agendas and initiatives scarcely conceivable under calmer circumstances. So it goes now.
Here we stand more than a year into a grave economic crisis with a projected budget deficit of 13% of GDP. That's more than twice the size of the next largest deficit since World War II. And this projected deficit is the culmination of a year when the federal government, at taxpayers' expense, acquired enormous stakes in the banking, auto, mortgage, health-care and insurance industries.
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Obama's Health Cost Illusion
Originally Posted At Wall Street Journal
June 9, 2009
The main White House argument for health-care reform goes something like this: If we spend now on a hugely expensive new insurance program for the middle class, we can save later by reducing overall U.S. health spending. This "tastes great, less filling" theory could stand some scrutiny, not least because it is being used to rush through the greatest social spending program in American history.
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A Tale Of Two Treasuries
Originally Posted At The American Spectator
By Darrell Issa
June 8, 2009
In his debut as the nation's 75th treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner has been a smashing success -- if success is measured by more federal debt and less accountability to American taxpayers. It was never supposed to be this way.
When our first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, sought to establish the nation's first bank in 1791, he faced challenges from those who condemned the move as an unconstitutional power grab to control the flow of credit and direct the national economy. Against these criticisms, Hamilton drafted numerous provisions to ensure solvency, transparency and fiscal restraint on the part of the federal government. "No government,” Hamilton argued, "has a right to do merely what it pleases.”
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The Economy Is Still At The Brink
Originally Posted At New York Times
By SANDY B. LEWIS and WILLIAM D. COHAN
June 7, 2009
WHETHER at a fund-raising dinner for wealthy supporters in Beverly Hills, or at an Air Force base in Nevada, or at Charlie Rose’s table in New York City, President Obama is conducting an all-out campaign to try to make us feel a whole lot better about the economy as quickly as possible. “It’s safe to say we have stepped back from the brink, that there is some calm that didn’t exist before,” he told donors at the Beverly Hilton Hotel late last month.
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Why The Health Care Rush?
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
June 3, 2009
If sharks stop swimming, they sink and drown. President Obama seems to view his health-care program the same way. "If we don't get it done this year," he said in a recent pep talk to supporters, "we're not going to get it done." Well, why? If laying "a new foundation" for 18% of the economy really is as important as the President claims it is, then surely it could withstand more than fleeting inspection.
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Reagan Did What? The Fantasies Of Paul Krugman
Originally Posted At Lew Rockwell
By William Anderson
June 2, 2009
Ronald Reagan has been dead for several years, but Paul Krugman continues to chase his ghost. In his "Reagan Did It" column, Krugman claims that until Reagan was elected, the U.S. financial system was in great shape and that government-created cartels in finance, communications, and transportation had enabled us to have a wonderful "equal-benefits-for-all" economy.
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'Shock And Awe' Statism
Originally Posted at The Washington Post
By George F. Will
June 1, 2009
Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people's money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired.
The world, he realized, would be a sweeter place if Congress mandated that all companies with 100 or more employees provide a week of paid vacation to those who work at least 25 hours a week. After three years, they would be entitled to two weeks, and companies with more than 50 employees would have to start providing a paid vacation week. Grayson would not mandate that paid vacations be spent at Disney World.
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Recent News
Sunday, February 5, 2012
In yet another outrageous piece of social engineering from the British government, pensioners will be encouraged to downsize to smaller properties allowing local government councils to rent their homes out as public housing and manage the tenancy.
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Monday, January 30, 2012
Federal workers earn 16 percent more in total compensation — including wages and benefits — than comparable private-sector employees, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The key difference is in benefits, where federal workers average more than $20 per hour in compensation — 48 percent higher than the $13.60 in prorated hourly benefits in the private sector.
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Friday, January 27, 2012
A member of the Indiana General Assembly withdrew his bill to create a pilot program for drug testing welfare applicants Friday after one of his colleagues amended the measure to require drug testing for lawmakers.
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Retired lieutenant colonel's take on the military-industrial complex: As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.
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Thursday, January 19, 2012
After largest tax increase in Illinois' history, the state still can't pay its bills. Only solution is to cut government spending says state comptroller.
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Nearly half of all Republican primary voters say it’s time the U.S. stops intervening in world affairs and focuses on domestic priorities instead, signaling a persistent rift that is playing out in the party’s presidential nomination battle.
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Monday, January 16, 2012
New CNN/ORC International Poll released Monday also indicates that Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas are running even with President Obama in possible showdown this November.
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Monday, January 9, 2012
Most voters still want to see the national health care law repealed and believe repeal of the controversial measure is likely.
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Friday, January 13, 2012
President Obama is leading the pack in donations from the defense industry: according to the Center for Responsive Politics, he’d taken in almost $112,000 from defense industry donors through December 2011, twice as much as Mitt Romney, the leading Republican recipient of defense-industry campaign contributions.
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Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Jail inmate dies after deputies directly sprayed him and fogged his cell with pepper spray at least 8 times. Deputies then put him into a restraining chair, a controversial device that binds inmates at both wrists, both ankles, and across the chest, and then sprayed him at least two more times after he had been strapped to the chair. He was also stripped naked, and outfitted with a "spit mask," a hood designed to prevent inmates from spitting on jail personnel, which kept the pepper spray in close proximity to his nose and mouth, ensuring he would continue to inhale it for the full six hours he was in the restraint chair.
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