Archive for category Democrats
“Stimulus or Sedative?” Thomas Sowell Never Disappoints
Posted by Tom in Business, Centrally Managed Economy, Democrats, Economics, Financial Crisis, Government Regulation, Monetary Policy on March 9, 2010
Sowell opens his succinct RCP post with an Abe Lincoln story: President Lincoln asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you call the tail a leg? Some shouted “Five” but Lincoln corrected them saying that the answer was four. “The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg!”
The professor uses that tale to drive home the truth about the “stimulus” and the “jobs bill.” The idea behind stimulus, for example, is to get investors to invest, lenders to lend, and employers to employ. Prime the pump, put a little bit of water in to get the well flowing. That little bit of water, the government money, was never meant to restore the economy by itself, but to get the private business sector going. What has happened?
- After the Bush-started stimulus in 2008–business spending fell by 28%.
- Durable goods spending fell by 22%.
- Four months after the TARP billions–large TARP banks made 23% fewer loans.
- The velocity of money fell faster than at any time in the last half century.
- The WSJ reports the “sharpest decline in lending since 1942.”
Why would banks lend when, “from the White House to Capitol Hill, politicians are coming up with all sorts of bright ideas for borrowers not to have to pay back what they borrowed…” Why would investors invest when a substantial number of the consumers are unemployed? Why would employers employ when faced with higher taxes and more Obamacare mandates? In short, the outlook is uncertain and certainly more big government than private sector oriented.
Sowell points out that none of this is new: during the Great Depression of the 1930s, money velocity, lending, investing and employment were all lower than they were in the 1920s. The anti-buisness rhetoric and anti-business policies did not inspire any more confidence then than they do now. “In an atmosphere where nobody knows what the federal government is going to come up with next, people tend to hang on to their money until they have some idea of what the rules of the game are going to be.”
Economists have estimated that Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged the depression by several years, how long will Barack Hussein Obama, Reid and Pelosi prolong our current difficulties?
Tom Motherway
Re-election Chances: Pelosi, No Sweat–Reid, “Angry-Mob Unpopular”
Posted by Tom in Democrats, Nationalized Health Care, Nevada, Politics on March 8, 2010
Saturday Night Live’s skit on Obamacare focused on the final push and how it jives with re-election chances. Quite funny:
“Paygo” Is Really Meaningless!
“Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else,” saith Obama in his weekly radio address last month.“After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do.” (See: Politico post.)
As Steve Martin used to say, EXCUSE ME!!!
When this “bedrock principle” was raised by Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky that Congress could only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere, to ask where the $10 Billion in extended unemployment and Cobra benefits was being paid for, the Democrats were outraged and foot-in-mouth Vice President Joe Biden lambasted the Republicans as inhumane!
As Jay Ambrose of the OC Register points out, you would think that the Democratic Congress could find a measly $10 Billion in all the pork they’ve barbecued in recent legislation.
“The special sadness in all of this is the hypocrisy of a president who just recently sold paygo as a mighty step toward fiscal responsibility. Not only was Biden then turned loose on an honest man trying to make paygo work, but the whole paygo law is by and large a con game to begin with. It can be waived with flimsy excuse and seems to exempt virtually every other budgetary sentence that begins with a capital and ends with a period. Even if it were religiously heeded, the budget could be swamped by the costs of the exceptions.”
I cannot say it any better: “It’s time to start worrying, fellow Americans. Really worrying.”
Tom Motherway
What’s Obama Up To?
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Deficit, Democrats, Economics, Financial Crisis, Individual Freedom, National Character, National Debt, Nationalized Health Care, State Finances, Statism, Taxation on March 5, 2010
On paper Obama appears to be a smart guy and reasonably well informed. I suspect he knows:
- We face $1.4 Trillion annual deficits for the next decade.
- Our current national debt is $12.3 Trillion and will grow by $1 Trillion a year.
- Estimated unfunded liabilities from social security and medicare are $107 Trillion.
- States with aggregate deficits of $350 Billion, debt of $1.9 Trillion, and unfunded liabilities of $1.4 Trillion are asking for federal handouts.
- Unemployment is 9+% with private sector growth stalled.
Why then would he promote a radical takeover of healthcare with 10 year costs of $2.3 Trillion that adds $1.86 Trillion to the deficit over the next 20 years, that creates employment taxes and mandates, each discouraging private sector employment, and that fails to solve the demographically certain failure of medicare, social security and medicaid? We’ve proven our inability to handle two, no three if you include medicaid, major entitlements, why add another? And why would he risk his party’s control of Congress and his own ability to govern to attain this goal that a majority of Americans don’t want?
Obama is smart enough to know that Obamacare will exacerbate the financial straights of the United States. It’s uncertainty will decrease private sector employment. It’s taxes will decrease private capital for investment. It will cede financial and technological leadership to other countries. In short, we will be worse off tomorrow than we are today. Why would he risk that…want that?
It is clear that he knowingly intends to drive us further to the brink. It is also clear that given his apparent intelligence he has an end-game in mind. Take our admitted crisis, you know the “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” kind, explode it into a gigantic, off-the-clff catastrophe, then come up with a one-of-a-kind, popular solution that involves “shared pain” and if we are all lucky, someday “shared gain.” Call it a Cloward-Piven Strategy on steroids. (See: Cloward-Piven Strategy: Is It Obama’s? and references cited therein.)
As Larry Kudlow said in NRO, One Giant Government Leap Backwards,” One of the most galling features of this plan is a taxpayer-subsidized government-insurance entitlement for people earning up to 400 percent above the poverty line, or nearly $100,000 for a family of four. In other words, a middle-class health-care entitlement that will add millions of people to the federal dole. It’s all too reminiscent of the political dictum of the old New Dealer Harry Hopkins: tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.”
So will Obama’s “Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Commission” turn out to be the VAT Commission with a European 12% sales tax on top of the income tax, excise tax, etc. And those on top of the various state sales, income and property taxes? All this to finance BIG GOVERNMENT? If so, we will then all have the advantage of being “in the same boat,” “equal,” and “happy” in an ever declining country and economy.
So for the literarily inclined, Obama wants us on Hayek’s Road to Serfdom where we will encounter Orwell’s Animal Farm with 1984’s Big Brother in control. As Obama recently said in response to a push-back, “we won the election.” And win the next election and the next, he aims to do with the creation of more and more dependency on him and less and less individual responsibility.
I won’t be around to witness the outcome but I hope the next generation will become informed and engaged, lest our grandchildren and great-grandchildren suffer horrible consequences.
Tom Motherway
“idiocy of Yucca Mountain” Blasted by AEP CEO Morris
Posted by Tom in Deficit, Democrats, Energy Facts & Policies, Government Regulation, Nevada, Statism, Yucca Mountain on March 5, 2010
Today’s WSJ front page notes Democrats Revolt Over Energy. Apart from the subsidies wasted on wind energy used to enrich Chinese manufacturers and the EPA proceeding to regulate the air we exhale, the Yucca Mountain closing is coming under fire.
Big utility operators as well as some states like South Carolina and Washington are blasting the Obama administrations announcement that it will drop plans for a federal nuclear-waste vault beneath Yucca Mountain.
“The Energy Department’s move to formally drop its application for the Yucca Mountain waste site could hobble efforts to build more nuclear power plants—a strategy the Obama administration has promoted as a way to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. Without a permanent solution to the waste-storage problem, several states, including California, won’t let new nuclear plants be built.”
“Michael Morris, chief executive of American Electric Power Co., said on Thursday that “there has to be a reaction,” because Yucca is the only site that’s been vetted and deemed capable of storing waste from the nation’s 104 operating power reactors. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference, he blasted the “idiocy of Yucca Mountain” being terminated as a repository, and said the government will have wasted $10 billion on the project if it doesn’t proceed.”
“Under federal law, Yucca is the designated site for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. But the repository is more than a decade behind schedule. As a result, the waste generally remains at the nuclear reactors and DOE sites where it was generated.”
But what’s a few billion dollars wasted, a significant number of jobs lost, and the pronouncement of conflicting federal policies to this consummate totalitarian? 2012 can’t come any too soon!
Tom Motherway
Tale of Two States & Health Care
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Democrats, Economics, Government Regulation, National Character, State Finances, Statism on March 2, 2010
Yesterday’s WSJ editorially gave us a snapshot of ObamaCare (Back to the ObamaCare Future) using the sad story of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts venture into state controlled healthcare. Of course Romney is now out burnishing his “conservative” credentials (read RINO) and the medical dictator job has devolved to Governor Deval Patrick.
What has happened? Costs have exploded–$47 M over budget. Spending has jumped 6.7% per year in a non inflation environment. Massachusetts insurance premiums are the highest in the nation having climbed at a 30% annual rate. Per capita health spending is 27% higher than the national average. Romney like Obama sold his healthcare as a way to control spending!
So Governor Patrick is proposing hard price controls on all Massachusetts healthcare. Regulators will cap insurance premiums; despite the fact that insurers pay out $1.12 in benefits for every $1.00 in premiums, a medical loss ration of 112%! He’s also filed a bill that will give regulators the power to review rates of hospitals and physicians; those that are deemed too high “shall be presumptively disapproved.”
Get the picture? OBAMACARE!
But there was also a positive state healthcare story in the same paper same edition. Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana penned an op-ed, Hoosiers and Health Savings Accounts, relating his quest five years ago for a consumer-directed heath insurance option for state employees. He got Indiana’s HSA enacted. For those choosing this option, each has his own health savings account supplemented with a high deductible (catastrophic) insurance policy; the state deposits $2,750 per year into these accounts which grow with interest.
What happened? First year some 4% of employees signed up; this year over 70% of the 30,000 employees signed up; there is $30M of employee money in these accounts growing with interest. These employees will save more than $8M compared to those who stayed with the traditional insurance. Indiana will save at least $20M this year since total costs have been reduced by 11% solely due to the HSA option. HSA participants ran up only $65 in medical costs for every $100 in costs incurred by the employees in traditional plans.
Indiana’s 70% HSA participation rate compares to a national rate of only 2%. Why? Public employee unions have rejected the HSA plans. As we know, Obama, being the puppet of the public employee unions he is, has denounced high-deductible HSA related insurance as “not real insurance.” (See: Where’s the Consumer) Obama doesn’t want consumer driven healthcare. He wants to control this 16% of the American economy. He wants to control your healthcare, make your decisions for you. You aren’t smart enough to do it yourself. But, don’t try to tell that to the Hoosiers!
Get the picture? OBAMACARE!
Tom Motherway
“You Can’t Borrow Against the Future…You Don’t Have One”
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Deficit, Democrats, Nationalized Health Care, Statism, Welfare on February 27, 2010
I can’t say it any better than Mark Steyn does in today’s NRO post, When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay. Here are a few lines as a tease to the whole article–a must read if there ever was one!
“While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.”
“What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 — or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids — ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility — the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.”
“So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?”
Click on the link above and read on….you’ll see that California is further along in the chapters!
Obama Can’t Answer Paul Ryan
Posted by Tom in Deficit, Democrats, Government Regulation, National Debt, Nationalized Health Care, Statism, Taxation on February 25, 2010
Stephen Spruiell’s succinct report today in NRO, Ducking and Dodging, clearly sets out the Obamacare fiscal deficiencies highlighted today by Paul Ryan. Representative Ryan blasted Obama’s “insurance care” today and none of the Democrats could counter his arguments. Basically he pointed out that Obamacare front-loads tax hikes and Medicare cuts and defers costs, forcing the CBO to score ten years of offsets with only six years of spending! The true cost of the bill is $2.3 Trillion not the $950 Billion advertised by Obama.
Ryan focused further on other Democratic gimmicks:
- Double Counting: “savings” are counted as offsets for spending and at the same time reserved to pay for future entitlements. Example, $52 Billion in Social Security tax increases.
- “Doc Fix”: The bill’s 21% cut in Medicare reimbursements is put back in via separate legislation not subjected to combined CBO scoring.
And what does the wimpy Obama say in response? “We have some strong disagreements on the numbers, but I don’t want to get too bogged down!” If there were disagreement you would think he would have answered the criticisms.
As for getting bogged down, Obama should start getting real bogged down in his record breaking deficits, unsustainable national debt and bankrupting unfunded liabilities. Instead he is hell-bent-for-leather to add to that trio of financial irresponsibility. And this at a time of high unemployment when small businesses won’t hire because of the uncertainty, regulation and taxes proposed with Obamacare!
I guess destruction of our economy is a small price to pay for these socialists to gain total control of that economy. You’d think they would see it as a bad bargain.
I pity our future generations.
Tom Motherway
Obamanomics Will Lead To Our Demise
Posted by Tom in Business, Centrally Managed Economy, Democrats, Economics, Government Regulation, Taxation on February 24, 2010
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry to see the dynamic trio, Obama-Reid-Pelosi, ramming Obamacare down our throats at the small price tag of $950 Billion, oh yes and price controls on private insurers, expensive mandates on employers, and the government take over of 16% of the U.S. economy. Employers are not hiring, not investing, and not borrowing. At the very time jobs are needed businesses face health care uncertainty, higher taxes, falling consumer sentiment and high unemployment. Why invest if there aren’t going to be any consumers around to consume? Consumption is three quarters of the economy!
The only jobs the non-stimulus stimulus has created are government jobs–that would be the non-productive jobs that are a drag rather than a stimulus to the economy.
Speaking of economy, Robert Robb pens a dynamite article in Real Clear Politics today, The Chief Economic Worry About Democrats. With syllogistic logic he points out the elites lack of appreciation of investment capital and its function in the economy. Liberals assume a given level of economic output, a dangerously false assumption. Output doesn’t just happen it depends on investment capital. The government cannot supply that capital but can only redistribute what it takes by way of taxes. What it takes in taxes is withdrawn from private productive investment.
“Producers have to produce before consumers can consume. But producers cannot produce ex nihilo. Investment capital provides the financial bridge between production and consumption….In reality, however, the affluent provide most of the country’s investment capital. They are the ones with discretionary income. What the rich do with their money is very important economically.
“The Democrats want to raise taxes on the affluent and on corporations (which are repositories of investment capital). The numbers, and their effect on investment capital, are staggering..So, between Obama’s budget and the health care plan, that’s a shrinkage in the nation’s investment capital pool of up to $1.9 trillion over the next decade. But that’s only the beginning of the effects. Between Obama’s increased income tax rates, the income tax surcharge in the House health care plan, and state income taxes, the highest marginal income tax rate in most states will approach or exceed 50 percent. That will hugely discourage savings and investment by the affluent.”
“This tax-the-rich approach is justified as a matter of social justice. The government needs money, goes Democratic thinking, and it is fairer to get it from the rich than the middle class or the poor. Democrats also tend to believe that large disparities in income and large accumulations of wealth are evils to be ameliorated in their own right. The rich already pay a higher percentage of federal income taxes than they make in income. And the true social justice question shouldn’t be whether income or wealth disparities are increasing, but whether the lot of the poor is improving. Concentrating on the latter question leads to entirely different policy choices than concentrating on disparities.” (emphasis added)
Robb’s back to Adam Smith basics is brilliant, thus I’ve perhaps over quoted in this post. What I suggest is a read of the whole article and selected comments following the article which are displayed by clicking on “COMMENTS” at the end of the article.
Tom Motherway
Health Care, Public Education Employment Better Than Average!
Posted by Tom in Deficit, Democrats, Education Facts & Policies, Nationalized Health Care, Nevada on February 15, 2010
Did you ever wonder why the inflation rates in health care and public education are higher than general inflation? Simple answer is that some one other than the patient or student is paying the bill. In some cases this is called welfare in others loans and in still others grants. In all cases some one else is paying.
Who is that some one else? YOU, OF COURSE! Taxpayers are paying but not consuming. So who is checking to see that health and education services are delivered efficiently? NO ONE!
Here’s the data comparing employment costs: All workers 2005=100, December 2009=111.2, 2.8% per year. Health care hospitals 2005=100, December 2009=113.3. 3.3% per year. Education services 2005=100, December 2009=113.1, 3.3 per year. See the Bureau of Labor Statistics report here.
As in the case with other third party payers, the real consumers, the patients and the students, don’t shop options and question prices and charges. The providers know this and know with certainty that they can charge what the “market” will bear. There really is no true market in the sense of competitive pricing. Where public employee unions are involved the situation is exacerbated. Salaries and benefits are raised by the politicians who are supported by the unions whose members’ salaries and benefits are raised. A vicious and unholy alliance!
So, in the case of Obamacare, the unions elect the Democrats, the Democrats raise their salaries, wages and benefits creating deficit spending and unfunded liabilities, the Democrats then claim we have a problem with the costs of healthcare so they propose to exacerbate that problem with Obamacare adding to the deficits, national debt and unfunded liabilities. Hell of a deal for the taxpayers! And a worse deal for their grandchildren!
Tom Motherway