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Obama’s Entitled America
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats are trying to sell their health reform plan by claiming that it will reduce the deficit. Apart from it being a terrible strategy to draw attention to our already out-of-control deficits, it is an absurdly inaccurate claim. The Congressional Budget Office has released a report directly contradicting this claim by showing that the proposal would add around $89 billion to budget deficits in its first 10 years. Deficits would increase dramatically in the following years.
Furthermore, Democrats are outright misleading the American public by advertising the cost of their plan to be only $849 billion over its first 10 years. According to the CBO analysis, only 1 percent of the costs will have even started to accumulate during the first 4 of those 10 years, so the “first 10 years” metric is misleading in itself. When taking a more honest look at the costs, the CBO’s numbers read quite differently (from the New York Post):
As the CBO analysis indicates, the bill’s real 10-year costs would start in 2014. And in its true first decade (2014 to 2023), CBO projects the bill’s costs to be $1.8 trillion — double the price Reid is advertising.
And that’s even though the CBO optimistically assumes the government-run “public option” wouldn’t cost a cent.
Over this same 10-year span, the 2,074-page bill would hike taxes and fines on Americans by $892 billion — more than the alleged price of the bill.
Why then are we adding more entitlement programs that we cannot afford? How are we going to pay for this? Of course, the answer is, and has been for some time, to simply borrow more from other countries like China (from the National Review):
Consider next the matter of debt. Obama inherited the Bush budget deficits — and then drove them through the roof. Indeed, he is on schedule not only to run up consecutive trillion-dollar-plus annual shortfalls, but also in his tenure nearly to match the aggregate debt piled up by all previous administrations combined.
A large portion of the new Obama borrowing has to be covered abroad, mostly through Chinese and Japanese purchase of U.S. government bonds.
The Obama administration expects to borrow yearly hundreds of billions of dollars from the Chinese to expand American health care. In some sense, therefore, 400 to 500 million Chinese — most of them without much access to even rudimentary medicine, doctors, and hospitals — will be working overtime to loan Americans enough money to ensure universal access to hip replacements, gastric bypasses, and flu shots.
Cut through the soaring rhetoric: We are left with an America that assumes the world’s less well-off will directly subsidize our own better-off.
No wonder that Obama has cooled his rhetoric on Chinese smoky coal plants, Tibet, mercantile trade policies, and human rights. All such idealism falls before America’s voracious appetite for borrowed cash.
Posted in Fiscal Responsibility, Health Care Leave a comment
Israeli “Settlements” Not The Issue
The left’s short-sighted preoccupation with Israeli “settlements” ignores the historic and strategic rationale behind them. For hundreds of years, Israel has traded land for peace; it has never worked. President Obama attempted to pressure the Israeli’s to end the development of these settlements. Many experts not only predicted that this policy would be a failure, but also questioned Obama’s naïveté.
The American Thinker touched on this topic quite well:
The other day, an Israeli archeologist presented a discovery of Biblical coins going back to the fall of Jerusalem in 67-70 C.E. It was the Roman Emperor-to-be Titus Flavius Vespasianus who conquered Jerusalem that year and razed it to the ground.
That was a long time ago, you say. But in Jerusalem, it’s right there in a never-ending flow of archeological discoveries. It’s here and now. Most of those Second Temple shekels went molten in the fire that swept the city when the Romans finally brought down the walls, killing innumerable Jews. Genocide was official Roman policy for rebels against Rome. In the city of Rome today you can still see the triumphal arch Titus built for himself, depicting his celebratory parade followed by the defeated Jews in chains. They are carrying an enormous Menorah carved in the marble on the top of Titus’ triumphal arch.
American military people can still understand that, but most American civilians can’t. We live only in the present. The average American has forgotten even Pearl Harbor, not to mention all the other bloody American sacrifices that still make us safe today. Third-world Socialists like Obama can never, ever understand it. Obama was quoted sanctimoniously honking that “more settlement-building doesn’t make Israel safer.” That lofty and typically arrogant platitude is contradicted for Israelis when they look at those rows upon rows of Jerusalem stone buildings, every row another fortification against an enemy that has never stopped attacking. The “settlers” are those people putting their bodies — and their children’s bodies — on the line of defense.
Posted in Foreign Policy Leave a comment
Liberal Bloggers Miss President Bush
Hillbuzz.org, a left-leaning blog written by a gay couple out of Chicago, just ran a post thanking and praising the former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush for visiting the victims of the Ft. Hood attack at Walter Reed while criticizing President Obama for his lack of leadership after the attack and for not taking a stronger stance against radical Islam.
Here is an excerpt:
Oh, how we RAILED against Bush in 2000…and how we RAILED against the surge in support Bush received post-9/11 when he went to Ground Zero and stood there with his bullhorn in the ruins on that hideous day.
We were convinced that ANYONE who was president would have done what Bush did, and would have set that right tone of leadership in the wake of that disaster. President Gore, President Perot, President Nader, you name it. ANYONE, we assumed, would have filled that role perfectly.
Well, we told you before how much the current president, Dr. Utopia, made us realize just how wrong we were about Bush. We shudder to think what Dr. Utopia would have done post-9/11. He would have not gone there with a bullhorn and struck that right tone. More likely than not, he would have been his usual fey, apologetic self and waxed professorially about how evil America is and how justified Muslims are for attacking us, with a sidebar on how good the attacks were because they would humble us.
The full post is a decent read with an interesting perspective and it definitely generated a “buzz” as it currently has over 1,000 comments.
We miss him too:
Posted in Defense, Foreign Policy Leave a comment
Corporatism vs. Capitalism
Ron Paul rightly points out that corporatism and greed are not principles of capitalism.
Posted in Economy Leave a comment
Opinion in SMU Daily Campus
In Charanya Krishnaswami’s defense of the Democratic health reform plan on Tuesday, she reiterates some common fallacious arguments that are misinformed, misrepresent the opposition, and frame the debate in a rather elementary fashion.
Krishnaswami seems to believe that the “public option” will bring honest competition to the health insurance market. This could not be further from the truth. The proposed plan has the very real potential of crowding out private insurance; and by force, not by providing more competitive rates.
In the latest Pelosi bill, an employer mandate will require small business owners to provide coverage for their employees or face an 8 percent payroll tax. Many economists have predicted that small business owners will drop their employees onto the “public option” since the 8 percent payroll tax will most likely be cheaper than the cost of providing private insurance.
Private insurers will also be subject to new regulations that control the price of premiums and require insurers to provide an “essential” level of coverage and benefits. This would be like Apple forcing Dell to put more expensive hardware in their computers and charge less to sell them. Dell would most certainly shut down as that level of production would be unsustainable. In short, the Pelosi bill is to competition as Yasser Arafat was to world peace — the relationship only seems harmonious if you’re liberal.
Then Krishnaswami goes on to imply that opponents prefer the “status quo” where rape victims are denied care on the basis of “pre-existing conditions.” All emotionally ridden anecdotal arguments aside, the notion that opponents prefer the “status quo” is elementary thinking to say the least. Everyone, for the most part, agrees that our current health care system can be improved and that reform is needed in certain areas. No one wants to see anyone get turned away for “pre-existing conditions” or get denied care because they can’t afford insurance.
But, if opponents are guilty of defending the “status quo,” so is President Obama. President Obama has said that the goal of the “public option” is to provide “a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep the insurance companies honest.” Everyone agrees that these principles are desirable, but it is ironic that President Obama has spent his entire political career voting against every effort to make the health insurance market more open and accessible.
While serving in the Senate, President Obama voted against allowing tax deductions for health care costs, against allowing competition across state lines, against allowing the use of tax-free Health Savings Accounts to pay for health insurance coverage, against requiring undocumented immigrants to own health insurance, and against other reform efforts that would have increased competition, decreased costs, expanded coverage, or some combination of the three.
Another issue with Krishnaswami’s logic is the assumption that having no insurance implies that no health care is provided. This is, of course, false. For example, just a few miles away, Parkland Memorial Hospital provides millions of dollars of health care services to thousands and thousands of uninsured undocumented immigrants every year. Parkland has even sent an invoice to Mexico without expecting to actually be paid.
Krishnaswami also cites the number of uninsured to be around 46 million, which has been broken down numerous times and exposed as the scare tactic that it is. For example, 17.6 million uninsured earn more than $50,000 and can easily afford private insurance. 9.7 million are undocumented immigrants or non-U.S. citizens and should not be covered by the American taxpayer anyway. 14 million qualify for Medicaid or other government programs that already exist. That leaves around 5 million out of 307 million that are truly uninsured and can’t afford insurance.
Lastly, health care is not a human right as Krishnaswami claims, but a commodity just like food, water, or shelter. However, health care is arguably already treated as a positive right in America as more than half of Americans receive “free” health care from government programs like Medicare and Medicaid at the expense of the American taxpayer of both today and, as debt continues to accumulate over time, tomorrow.
Posted in Health Care Leave a comment
Reconciliation: Abuse of Power?
Lately, we have been hearing talk of the Democrats’ plan to ram ObamaCare through Congress via reconciliation, a parliamentary tool traditionally used for fast-tracking budget measures with only 50 votes. In the context of health care reform, the invocation of this tool is indeed an abuse of power. Even some Democratic proponents of the legislation would agree according to the Wall Street Journal: