More Hidden Costs from Obamacare

The front page of The Charleston Gazette for today details yet another of the invoices that will be coming due as taxpayers continue to be fleeced by Obamacare.  This time, the consequences of the President's fiscal disaster are reaching deep into the pockets of West Virginia taxpayers who will have to pay the additional costs for mandated expansions of coverage to every West Virginia public employee and their dependents covered by the State's health care plan.

Ted Cheatham, the Director of the West Virginia Public Employee's Insurance Agency ("PEIA") broke the bad news to PEIA's Finance Board yesterday.  Because of the coverage mandates under Obamacare, PEIA's expenses will increase by $30.1 million in fiscal year 2012 (which runs from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012).  By fiscal year 2015, the estimated cost increases will reach $38 million.  (Sorry, I wasn't able to find a full copy of the report online, but if I do, I will post it.)

So what are these coverage mandates?  Under Obamacare, coverage for mental health issues must be the same as coverage for all other medical conditions (previously, PEIA placed coverage caps and other cost controls on mental health coverage).  In addition, Obamacare requires all insurance plans to cover the children of the insured to age 26 (ahh, the cycle of dependency).  Just the expanded coverage for children alone will cost PEIA $8.6 million per year by fiscal year 2015.

The subsidy provided by West Virginia taxpayers to public employees for the cost of health insurance runs to more than 70% of the total cost of the insurance, so the taxpayers will be hit by these increased costs in a big way.  But the increased costs will hit public employees hard too, as premiums, copays and deductibles are raised to cover the increased costs caused by Obamacare.  The current PEIA Board has taken a lot of hard positions lately and tried its best to hold the line on costs, as the article details.  But no amount of cost-cutting will save West Virginia's public employees, who are not particularly well-paid to begin with, from increased costs:

Projections are that PEIA will finish the current budget year on June 30 with an annual surplus of about $40 million.

Cheatham said he had initially hoped those funds could be used to avoid having to impose any premium increases next year.

"The problem is, it's all going to be offset by the federal health reform," he said.

I wonder what the West Virginia Education Association, which strongly supported Obamacare through its parent the National Education Association, do when Obamacare causes the WVEA's members to go home on payday with less scratch in their pockets?  And how many other states will have to deal with the same issues as PEIA?

Obamacare and the Law of Unintended Consequences

In an article published on May 6 in the online version of Fortune magazine, we get a good look at the manner in which capitalism works.  The article details how several large corporations have responded to the passage of Obamacare by performing analyses of the cost of continuing to pay for health care for employees versus the cost of paying the penalties provided in the Obamacare bill for not providing health care.  We learn that Verizon, AT&T and other large companies performed cost/benefit analyses of the Obamacare provisions and found that they will be able to save significant amounts of money if they simply cut their employees loose and instead pay the penalties:

AT&T revealed that it spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option instead.

Corporations exist to make money for their shareholders.  If you were on the board of directors of AT&T and you learned that you could save $1.8 billion per year by cutting off health care benefits for your employees and instead turn those employees over to the government-run health care "exchanges" that will be created under Obamacare, don't you think you would owe a duty to your shareholders to give the matter serious consideration?  In fact, under the fiduciary responsibility laws that apply to corporate directors, those AT&T directors are probably required by law to consider turning the employees over to the exchanges.  What would be the downside to the company?  Certainly, in the marketplace for employees, AT&T would have to compete for employees with other companies that do not make the switch.  Potential employees might choose a different job over an AT&T job in order to avoid the government-run insurance exchanges.  But the Fortune article explains how a company like AT&T could cut off health care benefits and still compete for employees:

So what happens to the employees who get dropped?

And why didn't these big employers drop employee coverage a long time ago? The Congressional Budget Office, in its crucial cost estimates of the bill, projected that company plans will cover more employees ten years from now than today. The reason the bill doesn't add to the deficit, the CBO states, is that fewer than 25 million Americans will be collecting the subsidies the bill mandates in 2020.

Those subsidies are indeed big: families of four earning between $22,000 and $88,000 would pay between 2% and 9.5% of their incomes on premiums; the federal government would pay the rest. So policies for a family making $66,000 would cost them just $5,300 a year with the government picking up the difference: more than $10,000 by most estimates.

As bean counters know, that's not a bad deal for a company's rank-and-file, and it's a great deal for the companies themselves. In a competitive labor market, the employers that shed their plans will need to give their employees a big raise, and those raises could be higher, even after taxes, than the premiums the employees will pay in the exchanges.

So what does all of this mean for taxpayers?  According to the article, if 50% of the employees who are currently covered by employer-sponsored health care plans are instead turned over to the Obamacare exchanges, the cost to the taxpayers of the subsidies to the insurance exchanges will be $160 billion per year by 2016.  Ouch.  And guess what?  None of these costs show up anywhere in the budget projections for Obamacare.

The ultimate irony from this story is that none of this information would have been made public but for the grandstanding of Congressional Democrats.  After the passage of Obamacare, many large corporations subject to SEC regulation issued earnings restatements, which those companies are required by law to issue when events occur that will cause a significant change in expected earnings.  According to The New York Times, forty companies issued earnings restatements because of Obamacare reflecting total earnings reductions of $3.4 billion.  Congressman Henry Waxman then demanded that AT&T, Verizon, Deere and Caterpillar appear before his Congressional committee and explain themselves.  Rep. Waxman was just certain that the companies were involved in a grand conspiracy to discredit Obamacare.  But after reviewing thousands of pages of documents submitted by the companies, Rep. Waxman changed his tune and cancelled the hearings.  It turns out those earnings restatements were proper after all.  And among all of the pages of documents submitted by the four companies to Congress were those pesky cost/benefit analyses referenced in the Fortune article.  Ah, embarrassment.

And what of all this mess?  The law of unintended consequences will leave taxpayers to pay the bill for the outrageous costs of Obamacare, costs that were concealed and obfuscated in the course of the debate by every Democrat from the President on down.

Obamacare Without a Vote

As I have addressed in several posts below, Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in Congress appear intent on approving the massive Obamacare entitlement program without even having the House of Representatives vote on the bill.  In an article today in The Washington Post, the Speaker is quoted as follows:

"It's more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know," the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. "But I like it," she said, "because people don't have to vote on the Senate bill" [emphasis added].

She likes it because the House does not have to vote?  Truly, this whole process makes my stomach churn.  The Congress of the United States, under the control of the Democratic Party, plans to take over seventeen percent of our national economy without even subjecting the matter to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.  Are the supporters of Obamacare so wedded to the idea of the federal nanny state that they are willing to flout the Constitution of the United States in order to put their social policies into effect?

Senator Byrd and the Use of "Reconcilliation"

The video above has come to light featuring our very own Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) addressing the use of the "reconcilliation" process to force controversial legislation through Congress.  In the speech, made on the floor of the Senate in 2001, Senator Byrd explains how he opposed President Clinton's plan to use reconcilliation to pass Hilarycare.  I have not been able to determine the context of the speech, which was made when George W. Bush was President, but I would assume that he was using his opposition to President Clinton's plan to illustrate why he was opposing some Republican plan to use reconcilliation in 2001.  I seldom agree with Sen. Byrd, but I certainly do agree with him that reconcilliation should never be used to force passage of a controversial bill that does not have the support in Congress to pass by the normal set of parliamentary rules.  I checked Sen. Byrd's website and found nothing regarding Speaker Pelosi's current parliamentary manuevers.  I wonder if he will make the same floor speech this time around.

Notes from Here and There

Watching Sausage Being Made.  Want to understand the parliamentary mechanics required for Speaker Pelosi to get the Senate's Obamacare bill passed in the House of Representatives?  An explanation of the ugly process may be found here and here (if you have the stomach for it).

Debunking More Obamacare Myths.    How often have you heard that the uninsured drive up the cost of health care by using hospital emergency rooms as their source of primary care?  How about the one where the overall health of the nation's populace will improve if we just implement universal care?  Robert J. Samuelson, economist and columnist for The Washington Post, provides proof to the contrary.

Obama the Messianic President?  In case you have ever had any doubts about how The New York Times views President Obama, check out this photo illustration of the President with halo and cross.  I have no words for this one.

Mapping America's Future

Do you want to see a rational alternative to the nanny-state liberalism of the Obama Administration?  Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who stood up to President Obama at the so-called "Health Care Summit" discussed in the IVM post below, has presented a plan to put America on the road to a secure financial future while still addressing the important issues of health care availability and runaway entitlement spending.  Unlike Obamacare, which will increase the cost of health care for every single American while driving the nation into financial ruin, the health care proposals within Rep. Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future would:

• Provide a refundable tax credit to every single American to be used to pay the cost of health insurance coverage.  (Hmmm, where have I heard this before?  Oh yeah, I said it.)
• Break the current connection between employment and health insurance, thus creating a system of true insurance portability.
• Provide individuals with choices in health insurance by leaving the decision-making about what is the best fit to the individual rather than to employers.
• Get rid of the current health insurance tax subsidy that benefits large companies at the expense of small employers and self-employed individuals.
• Make health insurance universally available to every single American regardless of age or medical history.
• Encourage competition within the marketplace of health services, thus driving down costs.

So, are you ready to sign on now?  I certainly am.  Too bad that Congress seems intent on driving all of us off the cliff behind the wheel of Obamacare.

The Roadmap addresses other important issues too:  fixing the unfair and incomprehensible tax code; reforming the Federal budget system; and dealing with the looming disaster of entitlement debt to programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  And the next time you hear that the Republicans do not have a plan to address the issues important to average Americans--or worse yet, that Republicans are heartless beasts that don't care about the plight of average Americans--file it away as just the dying gasps of the beast that is the liberal nanny-state.

Debunking the Administration's Claims About the Cost of Obamacare

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District served as the lead-off batter for the GOP at President Obama's Healthcare Summit last week, and he hit it out of the park.  While the President continues to lie about the true cost of his healthcare plan, Rep. Ryan did an outstanding job explaining how the President's numbers simply do not add up:

"The bill has ten years of tax increases and ten years of Medicare cuts to pay for six years of spending. The true ten year cost when subsidies kick-in? $2.3 trillion. . . Does this legislative effort bend the health care cost curve?  It does – but in the wrong direction. It bends the cost curve up, not down.  Essentially, this bill chases ever higher spending with ever higher taxes. The taxes never catch up, resulting in ever higher deficits."

Despite the President's relentless focus on his health care plan, the American people are not buying it.  The lastest polling from Rasmussen shows that 52% of American's oppose the President's plan, while only 44% favor it.  Of the 52% who are oppposed, 43% say that they strongly oppose the plan, while only 22% of those in favor of the President's healthcare agenda say that they strongly support it. 

The American people are much smarter than the President appears to believe.  They understand that you cannot create a vast new government entitlement program without spending a vast amount of money--money that we simply do not have.  The President seems to be telling us to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" while the great and powerful Oz uses smoke and mirrors to disguise the insanely high cost of his healthcare agenda.
 
Take the time to listen to Rep. Ryan's complete opening remarks, and pay attention as the camera occasionally flashes to the President's face.  Notice that pained, pinched expression?  It is the expression of a man confronted by the truth, and the truth hurts.
 

The Obama Budget

Yesterday, President Obama presented his fiscal year 2011 budget to Congress.  Since then, every news organization and every pundit on every side have tried to parse the text to determine what it all means.  For certain, when The New York Times, which never wastes an opportunity to serve as cheerleader for Team Obama, calls the President's spending and debt levels unsustainable, they certainly must be so.

Shall we consider the numbers?  Here are a few to ponder:

• A deficit in the Federal budget of $1,270,000,000,000 (that is $1.27 Trillion) for the coming year, which is on top of the deficit of $1.56 Trillion during President Obama's first year in office.
• According to the President's own projections, after a short period of leveling off from 2014 to 2018, the Federal budget deficit will begin another cycle of dramatic increases beginning in 2019.
• The President's projected budget deficits over the next ten years cumulatively total $8.53 Trillion (and remember, these are just the deficits, not the total national debt).
• Total Federal revenues for FY 2011 will exceed $2.57 Trillion, an increase of 18.6% over Federal revenues for the preceding year.

In the President's remarks, linked above, he blames George W. Bush for the budget problems, continuing a trend that is growing old.  For example, he placed part of the blame for the current budget deficit on the passage of Medicare Part D (the drug benefit) during the Bush Administration.  However, he conveniently leaves out the fact that Part D was strongly supported by BOTH parties in Congress and that the version favored by the Democrats was actually much more costly than the version that was ultimately adopted.  And if Part D entitlement is to blame for a large part of the Federal budget shortfall, then why doesn't President Obama simply urge the repeal of the benefit?  The current budget belongs to President Obama, not President Bush, and he needs to take the blame for his own runaway spending rather than blaming it on the previous Administration.  And just so you know, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a supporter of the free-spending of President Bush and Congressional Republicans when they controlled the budget.  The same rules apply to all, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

We should not lose sight, either, that all of the numbers being pushed around by the Administration and others regarding the budget fail to consider the consequences of Federal unfunded budget liabilities, which add Trillions and Trillions more to the national debt.  According to David Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States, the current national debt figure of $12.3 Trillion that is quoted by politicians and news sources should actually be $45 to $50 Trillion more to account for unfunded liabilities from Medicare, Social Security and other Federal programs.  And you can also add to the bottom line the $6 Trillion or so that taxpayers are on the hook for as a result of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac takeovers.

Our government cannot continue to bury us under mountains of debt.  If the current trend continues, we will become a client state of China, to whom we owe all of that money.  (Do you think the Chinese know this fact?  I'm betting they do.)  Someone must step up and speak the truth:  entitlement spending must be brought under control.  We must stop borrowing our way out of economic hard times.  Creation of a massive new entitlement program in the form of Obamacare cannot be justified in the face of our current budget crisis.

Latest Poll Results on Obamacare and the 2010 Elections

The latest polling by Rasmussen Reports, conducted January 20 and 21, 2010, finds that only 30% of respondents believe that Congress should continue to pursue passage of Obamacare.  Yet, over in the swamps of DailyKos, the left continues to call for Congress to push the Senate version of the bill down America's throat.  It is no wonder, then, that Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics (yes, I am actually citing to a Wahoo) currently predicts a GOP pickup of seven seats in the Senate, twenty-seven seats in the House of Representatives and four governorships.  Among the Senators to fall:  none other than Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

Senator 41

Scott Brown's victory in the race to fill the Senate seat previously occupied by the brothers Kennedy (first Jack, then Ted) from 1953 to 2009 (but for a brief interlude from 1961 to 1962) is the political equivalent of pigs flying.  Republicans make up less than 12% of all registered voters in Massachusetts.  In the 2008 Presidential election, Barack Obama outpolled John McCain by more than 26% in Massachusetts.  Yet Scott Brown defeated his Democratic challenger, Martha Coakley, by a margin of 52% to 47%.

Brown's victory gives the Republican Party 41 seats in the Senate.  So long as those 41 Senators stick together, they can use the Senate's rules to block cloture on any debate (which requires 60 votes), thus preventing legislation from being placed before the Senate for a vote.  The seating of Senator-elect Brown in the Senate will place portions of  President Obama's agenda in jeopardy since all 40 current Republican Senators voted against Obamacare and will likely vote against any plan to pump more "stimulus" dollars into the economy.  Brown ran on a platform that emphasized the need to continue the war on terror, to provide tax relief and to control Federal spending. On Obamacare, Brown promised to vote against cloture in the Senate. The voters of Massachusetts understood that a victory by Brown would be a major roadblock to the agenda of the President and the Democrats in Congress, and yet they voted for Brown anyway.

My liberal friends have been harping all day that Brown's victory does not reflect overall discontent with the Democratic Party's agenda for America.  They argue that Coakley was a weak candidate who ran a poor campaign.  They argue that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee did not come through with any support.  They argue that the Coakley defeat represents disillusionment by the Democratic base because President Obama and the Democrats who run Congress have not been "progressive" (read that as ultra-liberal) enough.  But the polling numbers tell a different story:

• 78% of Brown voters strongly oppose the health care legislation before Congress
• 61% of Brown voters say deficit reduction is more important than health care reform
• 88% of Brown voters say it’s better to pass nothing at all than to pass the health care legislation pending in Congress
• 76% of Brown voters said that they were voting "for Brown" and not "against Coakley" 

In other words, the push by President Obama and the Democrats who control Congress for bloated and ineffective health care "reform" defined the Massachusetts election, and the person who vowed to stand in the way of the Democrat's plan won the race in convincing fashion.  In the face of the evidence from the Massachusetts race, coming as it does on top of the recent GOP victories for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, how can President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid be so tin-eared at to believe that they should now double-down their efforts to pass Obamacare at all costs?

On the other side of the aisle, the Senate GOP should take advantage of this situation to propose health care reform that makes sense.  I agree with my liberal friends that health care needs attention, but why does that have to translate into swallowing either the Democratic House or Senate bills that are now being considered?  Why can't we address the glaring problems that everyone agrees on rather than making secret backroom deals and passing out boxes of goodies to constituencies like Big Labor just so it can be said that something has been done?  To this end, I would propose that the Republicans in the Senate, with the enlisted help of some Democrats such as Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu, propose legislation that will address the following narrow issues:

• Place significant restrictions on pre-existing condition exclusions
• Restructure Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates
• Provide reimburseable tax credits to low and lower-middle income individuals and families to be used to purchase health insurance
• Place limits on exemplary damages in medical malpractice tort cases
• Permit insurance companies to sell health insurance across state lines

Republicans could use this opportunity to take the lead on health care.  A limited debate focused on these issues would not have to detract from the serious work that needs to be done to foster job creation in the current economy and to protect American citizens from the curse of Islamic terrorism.

Surprise! Dept. of Health and Human Resources Reports that Obamacare Will Increase Costs

Care for a bit of light reading for a Friday evening?  Then check out the report issued yesterday by the Chief Actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the Department of Health and Human Resources.  The report addresses the version of Obamacare that has been presented by Sen. Harry Reid as a complete amendment (i.e., a replacement for) H.R. 3590 (the so-called "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009").  In a development that should not come as a surprise to anyone who has given the matter any thought, the Chief Actuary tells us that the Reid version of Obamacare will increase the cost of health care over the period from 2010 to 2019 to the tune of $234 Billion (see page 4).  Egads.

Senators Reid and Baucus, among others, have been telling us that their version of Obamacare will save money.  The Chief Actuary's report puts the lie to these statements.  And the report also brings to light some other matters that Sen. Reid doesn't want us to know, including:

• Certain components of the plan would produce expenditures so far in excess of receipts that the programs would not be sustainable.
• Additional demand for health services under the expanded Medicare component of the plan could not be met in the short term.
• The proposed reductions in Medicare reimbursement rates would also not be sustainable.

The Chief Actuary's report comes on top of the latest CNN/Gallup polling data which shows that an astounding 61% of Americans are now opposed to Obamacare, and only 22% of poll respondents believe that their families will personally receive any benefit if Obamacare becomes law.

Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi need to abandon this mess now.

Opposition to Obamacare = Support for Slavery?

Yesterday on the floor of the United States Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said that Republican opposition to Obamacare equates with opposition to the abolition of slavery during the 19th century.  I kid you not.  An excerpt from Reid's speech, as reported in The Boston Globe: 

"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all Republicans have come up with is this slow down, stop everything, let's start over," said Reid. "You think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, 'Slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough.' When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted, 'Slow down, there will be a better day to do that. The day isn't quite right," Reid said on the Senate floor.

"When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today," he continued. "History is repeating itself before our eyes. There are now those who don't think it is the right time to reform health care. If not now, when, madam president? But the reality for many that feel that way, it will never, never be a good time to reform health care."

Sen. Reid failed to mention in his remarks that he has a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and that the Republican minority could not stop the Democratic majority from passing Obamacare if they presented a united front.  But they do not.  The reason Sen. Reid is attacking Republicans is because he cannot attack the members of his own party who refuse to go along with the creation of this massive government takeover of health care. 

Sen. Reid's comments are also interesting because, as so often has been the case, his own Democratic Party was the force behind the opposition to the historical initiatives to which he referred.  The Republican Party was formed in the 19th century primarily as an anti-slavery party in opposition to the pro-slavery Democratic Party.  The Republican Party was the first of the major parties to include a plank in its national platform in favor of universal women's suffrage, which it did all the way back in 1872.  And of course, our own Democratic Sen. Robert C. Byrd led the filibuster in the Senate that sought to stop passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  In fact, Republicans, as a percentage of total membership in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, supported passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in far greater numbers than Democrats.  In the House, Republicans suppported passage by 80% to 20%, compared to only 63% to 37% among Democrats.  In the Senate, Republicans supported passage by 82% to 18%, compared to 69% to 31% by the Democrats.

The next time Sen. Reid resorts to history for support of his agenda, he might want to come up with some better examples.

A Mountain of Debt, and Other Thoughts for a Monday

When the The New York Times begins to care enough to write about it, the Obama debt situation must really be getting out of control.    Of course, conservative commentators, including me, have been sounding the alarm bells for a long time (IVM discussed the President's money troubles from its founding back in September).  The Times actually sounds like it is concerned today when it notes that an increase in interest rates above the current unheard-of levels will cause Federal debt service payments to skyrocket:

Even a small increase in interest rates has a big impact. An increase of one percentage point in the Treasury’s average cost of borrowing would cost American taxpayers an extra $80 billion this year — about equal to the combined budgets of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

But that could seem like a relatively modest pinch. Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, estimated that the Treasury’s tab for debt service this year would have been $221 billion higher if it had faced the same interest rates as it did last year.

The national debt now tops $12 Trillion.  Increased debt service payments will continue to eat away at available Federal dollars unless the size of the United States' economy grows dramatically.

IVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVM

Yet another recent event highlights an issue of enormous concern to me:  when will the Obama Administration stand up to the Iranians?  I have written a number of times about the President's unilateral decision to withdraw SDI from Poland and the Czech Republic, a decision that has direct implications to the Iranian situation.  And the President has utterly failed to address Iran's nuclear ambitions, a fact that creates security concerns for Israel, Eastern Europe, Iraq and India.  But why would a "progressive" American President ever want to abandon the moral high ground with respect to human rights and fostering democratic governmental institutions?  Yet the President has done exactly that, in a statement issued, of all times, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran:

I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.  We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs.

Beyond the basic fact that this statement was issued on a date commemorated by Iranian's mad mullahs as a great victory by Iran over "The Great Satan", a couple of things jump out at me.  First, the President says in the statement that he seeks a relationship with "the Islamic Republic of Iran."  The "Islamic Republic" is the same government that is now run by the madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who bullied his way to re-election by intimidation and murder.  Why could not the President simply have said that he seeks a relationship with the people--the ordinary citizens--of Iran?  And second, while the President was reaching out to a government run by institutional terrorists, the streets of Tehran were filled with thousands of protesters who risked their very lives to challenge the government of the "Islamic Republic."  Yet the President offered not one single word of encouragement to those brave souls.  Instead, he made it clear that Ahmadinejad should feel free to continue to beat, torture, imprison and kill his domestic challengers because the United States will "not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs."  How can the United States assert any sort of moral superiority when our leader refuses to utter a word of support for those who only want to enjoy the same rights of free speech, free assembly and free association that we enjoy here?

IVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVMIVM

Ah, the liberal dream that is socialized medicine appears to be dying on the vine of many branches that is the Democratic Party.  To please "progressives" in the Party, any plan must provide coverage for abortion and must include a government-run option.  To the so-called "Blue Dogs" of the Party, the public option is a non-starter, and the final version must show some fiscal restraint.  And while all of the Democrats want to raise our taxes--Democrats LOVE to raise taxes--the Democrats in the House cannot agree with the Democrats in the Senate over which taxes to raise.  So while Harry Reid was able to muster enough votes to move the bill to floor debate in the Senate, he is a looooooong way from herding the cats of his party into the same pen.

My biggest issue:  the pathological lying by Democrats in both houses of Congress over the actual cost of their health care "reform" proposals.  They continue to trumpet that health care reform will actually reduce the deficit over the next ten years.  And how could a Trillion Dollars in new spending possibly reduce the deficit?  Because the Democrats play a parlor trick with the accounting by counting ten years of revenue against only six years of expenses, thus hiding the true cost of their "reform."

And while the Democrats are wasting all of this time and effort on a "reform" proposal that will either (1) fail; or (2) doom the American people to a massive debt burden for as far as the eyes can see, unemployment is reaching higher and higher and higher.  It truly is hard to believe that a gifted politician like Barack Obama can be so tone-deaf when it comes to the actual concerns of the American people.  As his poll numbers continue to slip, he and the Democratic Party-controlled Congress are doing nothing--NOTHING--about the economy.

On Debts and Spending

No, the title of this post does not refer to my personal financial situation.  Instead, I have a reality check on our national debt and the effect of current runaway spending on our collective financial security.

"Yawn," you say?  Well then, just try to wrap your mind around the following numbers:

• The current unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare amounts to $107 Trillion.
• The Social Security and Medicare unfunded liability is growing at the rate of $5 Trillion every year!
• Of the Social Security and Medicare unfunded liability, the greatest portion is due to Medicare, which alone accounts for $89 Trillion of the total.  The Medicare prescription drug benefit (enacted by the Bush Administration, which was no stranger to overspending) accounts for $17 Trillion of the Medicare liability.
• By the year 2054 (when my daughter will be approaching retirement age), the payroll tax rate for Social Security and Medicare Parts A, B and D will need to be a staggering 37% in order to cover then-current obligations to retirees.  And remember that the payroll tax does not include Federal, state and local income taxes, with total combined rates that can be as much as 40% in some states.
• According to the Congressional Budget Office, if spending on Medicare and Medicaid continues to increase at its current rate, by the year 2050, at current income tax rates, the entire Federal budget will be consumed just to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Source:  "Social Security and Medicare Projections:  2009", National Center for Policy Analysis, June 11, 2009.

Now, if those numbers do not wake you up, try this one for size:  Obamacare, depending on the final form it takes, will increase the size of the Federal budget by $1 Trillion to $2 Trillion each year.  And the "savings" that will supposedly pay the cost is a myth.  The only way that the Baucus bill that is under consideration in the Senate would achieve revenue neutrality will be if all employers place all of their employees into the government-subsidized plan and then, get this, give all of the savings back to their employees in the form of higher wages!!  Oh yeah, that's gonna happen.

The next time someone says that Obamacare is just like Medicare except that everyone will be covered, ask them whether they have a clear conscience about turning their grandchildren into indentured servants who work for nothing except to pay the bills run up by their grandparents.

And lest you think that the Obama Administration and the Democratic controlled Congress only want to spend your money on Obamacare, you should consider that they have approved increases in domestic discretionary spending of 12.1% for 2010 alone.   The linked article reminds us that inflation is less than 1%, yet the Democrats are increasing domestic spending by 12.1%.  And the increase does not even include the expenditure of the so-called "stimulus" money.  When the stimulus money is included, federal agencies will receive, on average, an increase in their budgets of 57% this year.  And through the magic of baseline budgeting, the increases become a permanent part of the agencies' budgets.  So if a conservative Congressman wants to decrease the size of a particular agency's budget in 2012 by, say, a modest 5%, he or she will be decried by the media and liberal interest groups for taking away from programs that benefit the masses, even though the actual budget, taking into account the 5% decrease, would still be up more than 50% in a two year period.

So remember, even as millions of Americans have lost jobs and real household incomes have shrunk this year, the Obama Administration and the Democrats in Congress are having no trouble at all spending money we do not have on programs we do not need.

Interesting Stuff from Here and There

A few stories I have come across today that I find interesting, in no particular order . . .

From The Washington Post:  Senate Democrats suffer heartburn after attempting to hide $250 Billion in increased health care costs:

John Cornyn (R-Tex.) . . . [stated], "This, of course, violates one of the president's first principles, when he said he won't sign any health-care bill that adds one dime to the deficit," he reminded reporters. "This adds a lot of dimes to the deficit."

From the Associated Press:  The House version of Obamacare will cause health cares costs to increase.

Measures in the legislation to reduce cost may take 15 years to 20 years to deliver a savings dividend . . . [and] tens of millions of newly insured people could put a strain on the health care system.

Again from The Washington Post:  an editorial warning about the runaway Obama budget deficits, which have now reached the staggering sum of $1.4 Trillion just for 2009:

Today, foreigners hold nearly half the $7.5 trillion U.S. public debt. As a result, the politics of deficit reduction are not only extremely difficult, they are extremely difficult and international. Inflation could trigger a global run on the dollar and a nasty interest rate spike.

From The New York Times:  an article about AP reporter Michael Graczyk, who has covered more than 300 Texas executions [I am personally opposed to capital punishment, which is a topic for another day]:

Seeing inmates in the death chamber, strapped to a gurney and moments away from lethal injections, he has heard them greet him by name, confess to their crimes for the first time, sing, pray and, once, spit out a concealed handcuff key. He has stood shoulder to shoulder with other witnesses who stared, wept, fainted, turned their backs or, in one case, exchanged high-fives.

From Newsweek:  an opinion piece by Jacob Weisberg concerning the Obama Administration's attacks on Fox News in which Weisberg calls Fox News "un-American":

What's most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he's doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, "fair and balanced" is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media's role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play.

This is rich.  The American press is about as independent of political inclination as, well, as I am.  The real reason Weisberg, who usually writes for Slate, is upset with Fox News is that Fox is cleaning everyone else's clock in the ratings.  If no one were watching Fox, neither the left-leaning media nor the Obama Administration would care what was being said.  And it is equally rich that a liberal would call Fox News "un-American" after all of the cries from the left that "dissent is patriotic" when George W. Bush was still in office.  By the way, I do not watch either Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly.  About the only show I watch with any regularity on Fox News is Special Report, which is on from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.

Whole Foods and the Health Care Debate

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc., recently penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which he denouced the planned government takeover of health care.  As a result, he was demonized by the liberal media and other special interests for which government-run health care is a sacred cow.  This past weekend, Mr. Mackey sat down for an interview with The Wall Street Journal to discuss a wide variety of topics, including the fallout from his op-ed piece, the creative power of capitalism, the greed represented by out-of-control CEO pay, and other issues.  He is a fascinating man.  Check out the interview.