http://community.detnews.com/apps/blogs/henrypayneblog/index.php?blogid=2041 > Detroit, Mich. - Michigan just experienced its coldest July on > record; global temperatures haven't risen in more than a decade; > Great Lakes water levels have resumed their 30-year cyclical rise > (contrary to a decade of media scare stories that they were drying > up due to global warming), and polls show that climate change > doesn't even make a list of Michigan voters' top-ten concerns.
>
> Yet in an interview with the Detroit News Monday, Senator Debbie > Stabenow (D., Mich.) - recently appointed to the Senate Energy > Committee - made clear that fighting the climate crisis is her top > priority.
>
> "Climate change is very real," she confessed as she embraced cap and > trade's massive tax increase on Michigan industry - at the same time > claiming, against all the evidence, that it would not lead to an > increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. "Global warming > creates volatility. I feel it when I'm flying. The storms are more > volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes."
>
> And there are sea monsters in Lake Michigan. I can feel them when > I'm boating.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Charles Murray: Tax Withholding and a Separate Payroll Tax Hide the True Burden of Government
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204313604574328273572673730.html
The issue is that it is inherently problematic to have a democracy in which a third of filers pay no personal income tax at all (another datum from the IRS), and the entire bottom half of filers, meaning those with adjusted gross incomes below $33,000, have an average tax rate of just 3%.
This deforms the behavior of everyone—the voters who think they aren't paying for Congress's latest bright idea, the politicians who know that promising new programs will always be a winning political strategy with the majority of taxpayers who don't think they have to pay for them, and the wealthy who know that the only way to get politicians to refrain from that strategy is to buy them off.
For once, we face a problem with a solution that costs nothing. Most families who pay little or no personal income taxes are paying Social Security and Medicare taxes. All we need to do is make an accounting change, no longer pretending that payroll taxes are sequestered in trust funds.
Fold payroll taxes into the personal tax code, adjusting the rules so that everyone still pays the same total, but the tax bill shows up on the 1040. Doing so will tell everyone the truth: Their payroll taxes are being used to pay whatever bills the federal government brings upon itself, among which are the costs of Social Security and Medicare.
The finishing touch is to make sure that people understand how much they are paying, which is presently obscured by withholding at the workplace. End withholding, and require everybody to do what millions of Americans already do: write checks for estimated taxes four times a year.
Both of those simple changes scare politicians. Payroll taxes are politically useful because low-income and middle-income taxpayers don't complain about what they believe are contributions to their retirement and they think, wrongly, that they aren't paying much for anything else. Tax withholding has a wonderfully anesthetizing effect on people whose only income is a paycheck, leaving many of them actually feeling grateful for their tax refund check every year, not noticing how much the government has taken from them.
Yale refuses to publish Mohammed cartoons
the Yale University Press, decided to publish a book about the Danish cartoons without the Danish cartoons.
According to a piece in The New York Times, John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said that the decision not to include the cartoons was "difficult."
Really? Why was it difficult? Mr. Donatich presides over part of an academic institution whose motto is "lux et veritas," "light and truth." His "difficult" decision announced to the world that his motto timiditas et deditio: "cowardice and surrender."
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Newt: What's a year of life worth?
The British single-payer bureaucrats arrived at the price of an additional year of life in the same way they decide how much health care all British people will get, through a formula called "quality-adjusted life years."
That means that if you're sick in Great Britain, government bureaucrats literally decide if your life is worth living and, if so, how much longer and at what cost.
If it's more than $45,000, you're out of luck.
In the highest levels of the Obama Administration there is a theory of how to ration health care that is troublingly reminiscent of the British system of "quality-adjusted life years."
Dr. Ezekial Emanuel is a key health care advisor to President Obama and the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Earlier this year, Dr. Emanuel wrote an article that advocated what he called "the complete lives system" as a method for rationing health care. You can read it here.
John Mackey: The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare
Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?
Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America
Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.
Read the whole thing for free-market proposals on how to reform health care in America.
A Taste of Their Own Medicine
A Taste of Their Own Medicine. (Coburn Amendment #226) For many liberals in Congress, a new public health-insurance plan, to compete against private health insurance, is an absolute "must" for health-care reform. Virtually all independent analysts estimate that, given the special advantages of taxpayer subsidies and regulation, that the competition would be rigged, and millions of Americans with private health insurance today would be dumped by their employers into the new public plan. Sen. Tom Coburn proposed an amendment that would require all members of Congress and their staffs to enroll in the newly-created public health-insurance plan. This means that they would be required to give up their private insurance coverage (nationwide there are 283 plans competing for federal employees' dollars), which is today provided through the popular and successful Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). With many members of Congress openly willing to create incentives that would drive Americans out of their existing private coverage, Senator Coburn put his colleagues to a test. Although ten Senate Democrats voted against it, the Coburn amendment passed by one vote. Taxpayers should watch very closely whether this amendment is preserved or buried.
I'll give Congress their fleet of private jets if they agree to live on the "public" health care plan.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Town Hall decorum and a bit of history
I remember the anger 20 years ago. I was running Roll Call, the congressional newspaper, at the time. President Reagan signed the Catastrophic Coverage bill into law in July 1988, and Congress repealed it in November 1989. Six years later, Richard Himelfarb published an entire book on the subject, Catastrophic Politics. He described in detail how seniors "angrily confronted lawmakers on their trips home."
Nor is the concept of organizations getting people out to town hall meetings something new. Democrats used trade unions this way to help defeat President Bush's effort to reform Social Security and stave off the system's insolvency. [...]
The truth is that the uproar over the lack of decorum at some of today's town hall meetings is a sideshow. President Obama and many Democrats in Congress are trying to push changes in healthcare that Americans, quite simply, do not want. People are skeptical of plans that will vastly increase government spending at a time of record budget deficits—and they fear losing what they prize most: the ability to choose their own doctors and not suffer the kind of rationing that plagues European and Canadian systems. In addition, judging from history, they think that further government intervention will raise costs.
Fishy statements about health care reform
Keith Hennessey reports some "fishy" statements to flag@whitehouse.gov...
I call to your attention several fishy statements about health care reform legislation made by a gentleman named Dr. Douglas Elmendorf. He claims to be Director of the "Congressional Budget Office" and has posted frequently about health care reform on his website, cbo.gov. This information takes the form of personal posts on his Director's Blog, as well as in-depth reports that have the veneer of competent, thorough, impartial professional analysis. The IP address of his site is 206.106.246.254, and his organization has named their hideout the "Ford House Office Building."
Elmendorf appears to have several hundred followers in his organization, which has extraordinary influence over many in Congress. I understand that some right-wing Members of Congress support and even vote for his annual funding source.
Read the whole list at the link. I look forward to the response from the White House.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Barone: Government Health Care in Stealth Mode
Sounds "fishy" to me:
Barone, you have be reported to flag@whitehouse.gov. You are undermining the President who want to bring free health care to all. The CyberStasi will deal with you.Obama has never made his ultimate goal a secret; it's the same as Schakowsky's and Hacker's. The video shows him saying in October 2003, when he was running for the U.S. Senate, "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program." He adds, "We may not get there immediately," noting the Democrats must "take back" the White House and both houses of Congress -- a condition fulfilled last Jan. 20.
Campaigning for president in May 2007, he says, "But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately." That seems to imply that his goal remains the same as it was in 2003. "There's going to be potentially some transition process -- I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out, where we've got a much more portable system." Which of course government health insurance would be. You couldn't get away from it. The president's defenders depict this video and others like it as a patchwork of irrelevant and misleading statements. They also cite Obama's oft-repeated pledges that any health care bill he would sign would let you keep the insurance you have. They don't address the point, raised by Hacker, that you can't keep it if your employer stops offering it.
But, as Schakowsky says, "This is not a principled fight." Schakowsky, Hacker and Obama believe, out of idealism but also perhaps for crass political reasons, that America would be better off with a single-payer system like Canada's or Britain's. But they realize that they're operating in a country where most voters don't agree. The video helps us understand how they're seeking to reach their single-payer goal through government-option stealth.
Tom Coburn: Ten Questions Politicians Won’t Answer [on Health Care]
Senator Tom Coburn is one of two physicians in the Sentate. Read the whole thing.
5. If the public option is so wonderful, will you lead by example and vote for a plan to enroll you and your family in the public option?
I offered an amendment in committee to force members of Congress to enroll in the public option. Nine out of eleven Democrats on the health committee who back the public option refused. If the politicians creating the public option don't have confidence in it, neither should the American people.
I've introduced a bill along with Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) and Reps. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) and Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) called the Patient's Choice Act that guarantees coverage and choice for every American without raising taxes or increasing spending. In fact, our bill will save taxpayers at least $70 billion. Many other members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, are working on alternatives that don't herd the American people into a government-run program.
The choice is not between the public option and nothing. The choice is between the public option and an option that can win the support of the public. The future of health care truly is up to you.
Ken Gladney attends protest outside SEIU St. Louis headquarters
Like Jim Treacher said, if Gladney was an Obama supporter, right now he'd be more famous than Rodney King.
"Don't Tread on Me"
BREITBART: I am Kenneth Gladney
Last week, a black gentleman named Kenneth Gladney went to a town-hall meeting hosted by Rep. Russ Carnahan, Missouri Democrat. While passing out "Don't Tread on Me" flags, he was viciously attacked by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members. One called him a [n-word].
These union thugs were directed by the White House to go to the protests and "punch back twice as hard." And they did.
While the attack was captured on video and is available on YouTube, Mr. Gladney's horrifying story is absent from MSNBC's 24/7 media cycle. Mr. Krugman has yet to write about it. And Mr. Cooper has yet to condemn the attack.
Painting Protestors as "Partisan Mobs with Lies About Health Reform"
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/08/painting-protestors-as-partisan-mobs-with-lies-about-health-reform-democrats-rally-their-own-town-hall-activists.html
Supporters of President Obama formerly signed up as members of "Obama for America" received an email today from Mitch Stewart, the director of the group's current incarnation, Organizing for America, to show up at town halls and congressional offices as a counter to the protestors against the president's health care reform push.
Painting the protestors as "Insurance companies and partisan attack groups... stirring up fear with false rumors about the President's plan," Stewart's email tells supporters whom their member of Congress is and even provides information about town hall meetings they may be holding.
Writes Stewart: "As you've probably seen in the news, special interest attack groups are stirring up partisan mobs with lies about health reform, and it's getting ugly. Across the country, members of Congress who support reform are being shouted down, physically assaulted, hung in effigy, and receiving death threats. We can't let extremists hijack this debate, or confuse Congress about where the people stand."
I Am The Mob video:
In peril in Pyongyang? Those girls were in greater danger sharing a plane with Bill Clinton
I quote this mainly for the Bill Clinton joke...
A Mail on Sunday investigation has unearthed some rather surprising facts about the pair – facts that show they were hopelessly ill-prepared for their 'mission' to the Chinese-Korean border, that they were working for a minor television organisation run by a former ambulance-chasing lawyer and, while they no doubt did not intend to be captured, the hapless twosome ended up as valuable pawns in an international game of bluff and double bluff.Indeed, from the whole tawdry affair only one clear winner has emerged – an exuberant Bill Clinton – even if, according to an insider, 'the joke in the White House was that the girls were safer in North Korea than on the plane going home with Bill'.The two women were sent to China in March to do a report about North Korean refugees pouring over the border. A source familiar with Current said: 'It was the sort of bleeding-hearts liberal story that would play well to their target market. But then Laura decided to take it a step further.'The Mail on Sunday has spoken to a long-time Democratic Party insider, who is a confidant of Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, now President Obama's Secretary of State.'Laura is sweet but not very street-smart,' said the insider. 'She was sent to China to make a routine programme about refugees crossing the border from North Korea but, according to Kim Jong Il's people, she was walking across the border and leaping about.'The official North Korean report said Euna was holding the camera. Of course, there was speculation they were working for the CIA. Forget that. This has been a farce. It couldn't be more embarrassing for Obama and the agency. No one hired these girls. No one in Washington had ever heard about them until they were captured by the North Koreans.'From everything I have heard about Laura, she is a Valley girl who wanted to play in the big league. I think she did this as a stunt to compete with her sister. Lisa Ling works with people like Oprah. Laura earns peanuts at a network no one has heard of. This was her big chance.'
Friday, August 07, 2009
Peggy Noonan: ‘You Are Terrifying Us’
But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of "disinformation" in the health-care debate: If you receive an email or see something on the Web about health-care reform that seems "fishy," you can send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. The White House said it was merely trying to fight "intentionally misleading" information.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Wednesday wrote to the president saying he feared that citizens' engagement could be "chilled" by the effort. He's right, it could. He also accused the White House of compiling an "enemies list." If so, they're being awfully public about it, but as Byron York at the Washington Examiner pointed, the emails collected could become a "dissident database."
All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn't be.
Dear Peggy Noonan, we respect your right to free speech. Nevertheless, you have been reported to flag@whitehouse.gov for your irresponsible criticism of our program to bring health care to millions of poor, hard-working Americans. The whole WSJ enterprise deserves a visit from the CyberStasi.gov.
Carry on, fellow health care recipients, and thank Obama that you won't be left to die in the streets, which is exactly what would happen if the Republicans get their way.
Who's Behind the Internet Snitch Brigade?
Czardom has its privileges. This week, President Obama's health care overlord, Nancy DeParle, launched a taxpayer-funded initiative to recruit an Internet Snitch Brigade that will combat "disinformation about health insurance reform." As the White House explained in a special online bulletin:"These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."
Thursday, August 06, 2009
The Great Crash of 2008: Are governments or markets to blame?
Finally, I want to consider who are the winners from this on- going global financial crisis? The answer is: China, India and Goldman Sachs!
Let us consider the latter. This also provides a clue to the political economy behind the current crisis in its epicenter the US. As in the numerous Third World financial crises the question to be asked is who are the 'rent-seekers' who created the crisis and whose reluctance to take a 'hair cut' prevents the domestic polity from accepting the obvious cures. So that ultimately the intervention of an external agency like the IMF is need to administer the necessary cures. The crisis was caused by financiers taking ever risky gambles with the complicity of the government. This is reflected in the changing share of US domestic corporate profits that have gone to the financial sector. From 1973 to 1985 it was 16%. In the 1990s it oscillated between 21-30%. In the last decade it reached 41%. This was accompanied by a dramatic increase in pay: which rose from 1999=108% of the average for all domestic private industries to 181% in 2007. This great increase and concentration of wealth has created a new financial oligarchy similar to the one in the early years of the last century, which has great political weight in the US. At its head is Goldman Sachs. It has provided the Treasury secretaries under the last 2 US presidents and numerous alumni have held and continue to hold influential posts in devising and implementing US economic policy. (see Simon Johnson: "The Quiet Coup", The Atlantic Online, May 2009).
This explains some of the bailouts. Why for instance was Lehman allowed to go the wall but AIG was 'saved'? Lehman had the misfortune of both being a major competitor to Goldman's and being run and staffed by the 'barrow boys' from the Bronx rather than the Ivy League gentlemen manning its rival. AIG was saved I suspect because, as appeared when Congress forced AIG to disclose what it had done with its bail out money, it had to disclose that most if it was to pay off its counterparties, the major one being Goldman! It is ironic that just as the century old rise, decline and now fall of GM, which marked the era of American industrial ascendancy, with one of its chairman claiming that "what was good for GM was good for America", should now be followed by an era in which seemingly "what is good for Goldman is good for America", or more generally Wall Street.
Congress in Fantasyland
Congressional "logic" could also be applied to housing.
Why not knock down all houses built in America before 2000 and replace them with new and more energy-efficient houses? Wait -- we already evidenced the results of that experiment -- it happened in New Orleans. Rather than the government directly knocking down the houses, Hurricane Katrina did it for us. Are the people of New Orleans better off or worse off because of Katrina? Are all of the American taxpayers who footed much of the rebuilding cost -- hundreds of billions of dollars -- better off or worse off because of Katrina?
Many in Congress argue that the reason New Orleans is still a mess is because of federal, state and local government mismanagement and corruption. Yes, but now don't they want the government to run the health care system? And these folks are telling us that their new medical system will cover more people, will cost less, give us better care and not add to the budget deficit -- hmmm. Fantasyland!
Quite simply, upper-income people have options. History shows that when tax rates are raised, many will choose to work less (leisure is nontaxable), retire earlier than they had planned and save and invest less in taxable, productive activities. Those making more than $160,000 per year would need to have their taxes roughly tripled to take care of just this year's deficit. (One merely has to look at the tax evasion practiced by the chairman of the congressional tax writing committee, the secretary of the Treasury and the former majority leader, et al. at today's tax rates to know that they and their colleagues, as well as most everyone else, will find either legal or illegal ways to avoid paying the tax.)
Read the whole thing.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Why the Stimulus Isn't Working
Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic highlights this interesting factoid about the stimulus, complete with graph:
The best explanation I've found for why the stimulus didn't work is this graph from the GAO analysis of the stimulus act. It shows pretty clearly that the 76 percent of stimulus spending through the first four months went to fill in the gaping holes in Medicaid and state budgets. In other words, the stimulus isn't acting like a pole vault lifting job creation above the baseline. It's been acting like a crutch to keep state budgets and payrolls from tumbling.
Color me shocked. I realize there are people that think it's a noble goal, but spending billions preserving the status quo in government over the next four months while America bleeds jobs is most certainly not the rationale given to the American people who were told there was an immediate need to railroad through an economic stimulus.
Senators to put brakes on ‘cash for clunkers’
If they manage to extend the program, look for some enterprising Chinese company to start making new 'clunkers' and selling them for $3000 just so you can collect the $4,500 trade-in money. Maybe the government should pay car thieves to target clunkers, as long as they promise to cut them up for spare parts -- we wouldn't want anyone buying a clunker and reselling it to the government. They'd never thing of doing something like that in New Jersey. Couldn't happen.Republicans also pointed out that the administration had originally estimated the first $1bn in funding would last until November. Instead it is expected to run out in the next few days.
"When the administration comes bearing estimates, it's not a bad idea to look for a second opinion," said Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. "All the more so if they say they're in a hurry."
Prospects for overcoming a Republican filibuster were also dealt a blow on Monday with objections from a number of leading Democrats. Dianne Feinstein, the senator from California, and Chuck Schumer, the New York senator, both want to raise the fuel efficiency standards of the subsidised vehicles, 250,000 of which have now been funded.
If this idea takes off, we could pay people to throw stones at their windows and offer a government subsidy for energy-efficient replacement windows. Maybe inner city gangs could be recruited by community organizers to vandalize old buildings so that they could be fixed up with stimulus funds.
We could even apply this brilliant economic principle to health care. Let's hire mafia hitmen to take out old people who spend disproportional amounts on operations and drugs. Thing of the savings, and the huge reduction in the carbon footprints of those elderly folks. Now, we're talking about a real "cap and trade" program.
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