Revised GDP numbers suggest that going down is exactly what the economy is doing.  The government revised second quarter GDP growth from 2.4% down to 1.6%.  Even Paul Krugman is saying the stimulus didn’t work, but his solution is to drive the country into bankruptcy faster.  Krugman’s complaint was that the stimulus wasn’t big enough.  He also believe we should,” use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lenders, to engineer mortgage refinancing that puts money in the hands of American families.”  Fannie and Freddie have already sucked $160 billion out of the Treasury and Mr. Krugman wants to back up and re-inflate the housing bubble.  Talk about failed policies of the past, sheesh!

The solution to the jobs issue is private industry.  The problem is that this is the most anti-business government in memory.  Business is the target of the administration’s ire, tax policies, health care policies, cap and trade schemes, repeal of the Bush tax cuts, card check, financial regulation, have I left anything out?  So business is sitting on its hands.  No matter how much cash it may be accumulating it does not want to take any steps, like expanding, until the full weight of all these choking policies are understood and priced out or until the Democrats are run out of the Congress and the anti-business sentiment is lifted there.

So let the Joe Biden show continue.  The man who says he know little about economics and proves it with every speech will go on telling us how the stimulus is working exactly as planned.  President Obama will continue to take a new vacation about every 90 days and we will cross our fingers that there is something left to recover when we recover our government from these inexperienced, clueless dolts.

Two disparate news items this weekend got me thinking.  The main stream media is all abuzz with Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, even to the point of throwing the term royalty around.  It is estimated that the wedding will cost $3-$5 million, although Sally Quinn of the Washington post puts the bill at closer to $1 million.  The comparison was then made to the cost of Jenna Bush’s wedding, a mere $100,000.  This became fodder for The Joy Behar Show.  Comedian Judy Gold leaped at the opportunity to take a shot at Bush, “Yeah, well, if he could have found a way for us to pay for Jenna`s wedding, he would have done that, okay, he likes to spend other people`s money.”  An interesting perspective on other people’s money that I will return to later.

The other news items was an article in The New York Times, by Bob Herbert titled “A Sin and a Shame,” lamenting that corporations are hording cash and not hiring people and it is all so unfair, in fact, sinful.  This is while this government is spending huge amounts of money that someone will have to pay back, massive new programs like ObamaCare that we are still uncovering what that will cost, and enormous tax increases about to kick in on January 1 when the Bush tax cuts expire.  Perhaps they are hording cash for a reason?  Perhaps they are not hiring because they don’t know what any new employees will cost under these new programs, or for that matter what their existing employees are going to cost?  Perhaps it is because the latest economic reports show GDP shrinking and if that continues why would you start hiring if your business is going to slow down with the rest of the economy?

We have two very divergent views of the economy today.  One view is held by those who actually work in the private economy and the other view is held by those in the ivory towers of government, which brings me back to the weddings.  I really don’t care what the Clintons or the Bushes spend on their daughter’s weddings.  It’s their money.  But perhaps it is instructive to look at where that money came from.

George Herbert Walker Bush, Jenna’s grandfather, was born into a successful family.  His father was a banker and a Senator.  But after getting out of the Army after WWII he went to Yale and upon graduation, moved away from that family and settled in Texas to start an oil company.  He went into private business and put his own money at risk.  What that means, to those who never took that chance, is you may be successful and make a lot of money, you may be successful and make a little money, you may fail and lose your money.  Chances are greater that you will lose than win, but that is the American Dream.  If you lose, you have to start over by trying to earn and save up what you lost to try again, if you have the guts and drive.  Bush succeeded in forming Bush-Overby and later with Zapata Petroleum.  He became President of Zapata for ten years and then Chairman for another two, before going into politics.  By then he was a millionaire in his own right.

George Walker Bush, Jenna’s dad, attended public school in Midland, Texas, where his parents had settled.  He went to private school after the family moved to Houston.  He later attended Yale University and became the only president to get an MBA which he did, from Harvard.  Like his father, he went into the oil business starting several independent oil exploration companies.  He later bought a stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team for $800,000 and was instrumental in building the team’s attendance.  He later sold his stake for $15 million.  Then he went into politics.

The two Bushes know risk, know about taking chances and became millionaires on their own before going into politics.  They also learned lessons about spending money and doing so prudently. 

Bill Clinton went into politics almost immediately after getting his law degree.  He was Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas.  As governor he had a governor’s mansion.  He ran for president and upon winning traded in his governor’s mansion for the Executive Mansion, aka the White House.  He had been on the government payroll and living in government provided housing almost his entire working life.  The sweat of the people in who paid their taxes paid him.  After leaving office, Mr. Clinton was able to write books about his experience and make speeches commanding six figures a pop.  His wife did pretty much the same.  They lived off the people and ended up very rich.  They didn’t create a product or service, they didn’t create jobs, and they didn’t meet a payroll. 

I can hear the screams from the left right now, “What do you mean he didn’t create a job or meet a payroll?”  Try this test.  If Bill Clinton’s opponent was elected rather than Bill Clinton, would there still be a government payroll and government jobs?  If yes, Bill Clinton didn’t create them.  If either of the Bushes didn’t create their companies would there be jobs at those companies or payrolls?  No.

What about some other famous politicians who tell us what to do?  Let’s look at Al Gore.  Here is another individual that spent the bulk of his career in government.  He was a member of Congress, a United States Senator, Vice President and presidential candidate.  Today he is very rich.  It is said he may become the first “green billionaire”.  If he went into his current endeavors before a life in government, would the story be the same?  Or is it because of his name, reputation, and connections that he made at the public trough, that he is wallowing in riches, and telling the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprint while his mansions consume ten times the energy of his neighbors?

Charlie Rangel spent most of his life in government.  He rose through the ranks and now has a waterfront condominium in the Dominican Republic, writes the tax laws but does not observe them, and is a wealthy man.  Conservatives don’t believe in rent control or rent stabilized apartments, but Charlie does.  After all, how can poor and middle income people afford to live in places like Manhattan if greedy landlords have their way.  So Charlie Rangel who makes $174,000 per year, plus his chairmanship pay, has not one, not two, not three, but four rent controlled apartments.  Is he poor or middle class?  No, he is the political class.  He took three adjoining rent controlled apartments and had them joined together, while the fourth apartment served, illegally, as his campaign headquarters.  What about the poor and blue collar workers who could live in Manhattan if three of your four rent controlled apartments weren’t being horded by you?  Let them eat cake.

John Kerry is in the news for trying to avoid $500,000 in taxes on his new yacht.  Here is another individual who spent his entire working life in government.  He can tell the rest of us to pay more taxes while he garners favors spending our money. He is the richest man in the Senate but with prenuptial agreements with his wife he only lists personal assets of between $400,000 and $1.8 million and joint assets with his wife of $300,000 – $600,000.  So how does he buy a $7 million yacht?  I am not suggesting anything nefarious, it’s obvious his wife paid for it, but do you think he is in touch with someone trying to make a payroll in the private sector?  You pay taxes; John Kerry has advisors to figure out how to avoid them.

So those evil corporations started by those evil men like George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush, know the value of a dollar.  They know we are not out of the woods yet and so to protect the jobs that their companies still have they are not hiring but are building their rainy day funds.  Perhaps Bob Herbert should ask why his employer is shedding jobs left and right.  Perhaps this is his safe way of doing so, but on the other hand the New York Times is hardly hording cash.  Its circulation is crashing because people like Bob Herbert are so out of touch with the rest of America; no one wants to read his rants any longer.

So perhaps Bill Clinton spends millions on Chelsea’s wedding because he didn’t learn the value of a dollar.  He lived of the government for many years and then just held out a basket and it was miraculously filled with more money than he can count.  George Bush spent $100,000 on a wedding because he knows how hard it is to earn a dollar.  What we need is less of the political class telling us what to do, and then handing us the bill and more entrepreneurial Americans who risk their own money, watch it like hawks, create jobs and generate wealth that they then reinvest in America.

Best wishes to Chelsea and Marc.

This week we saw President Obama come out swinging to that old class warfare tune.  Lashing out at Republicans in Congress for not adding to the deficit by extending unemployment benefits, he implied they were heartless and cruel.  The president used the same tired prop of the straw man, that is, accusing “the same people” without naming any of those people.  He uses this tactic because if he actually named the people he was accusing he would have to produce facts to back up the charges and Obama, as usual, doesn’t have any.

But here’s what he does have.  He has a record of focusing his energy on passing ObamaCare instead of focusing on growing the economy.  He is layering on more uncertainty of huge government programs and impending taxes that are scaring most small businesses from any hiring until the dust settles and they can tally up the bill.  He has Republicans who are ready to go along with the extension in benefits, if and only if, they are paid for.  With only about half of the $787 billion stimulus bill money spent, which is working fabulously by the way, taking the needed $30 billion from that kitty should be obvious. 

President Obama also has a chief economic advisor named Larry Summers.  Mr. Summers wrote an article on unemployment for the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics while at Harvard and in it he raised the following points:

• Government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment is by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work.
• Unemployment insurance also extends the time a person stays off the job. [Colleague Kim] Clark and I estimated that the existence of unemployment insurance almost doubles the number of unemployment spells lasting more than three months.
• If unemployment insurance were eliminated, the unemployment rate would drop by more than half a percentage point, which means that the number of unemployed people would fall by about 750,000.
• Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization. High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy. Also, those who lose high-wage union jobs are often reluctant to accept alternative low-wage employment.

It seems as if President Obama has painted himself into a corner.  The stubbornly high unemployment numbers are poised to ravage the Democrats in the mid-term elections.  But if his advisor, Mr. Summers, is to be believed, the unemployment benefits he is trying to use as a campaign issue against the Republicans is probably propping up the unemployment numbers.

The American people have reached their limit on deficit spending and want it reined in.  The Democrats put in place something called Paygo, which means pay as you go.  If you want something, you have to pay for it.  However, the Democrats are bypassing their own rule at every turn.  You can’t have it both ways, ceremoniously pass a Paygo rule for the purpose of the photo op and to look responsible, and then spend recklessly once the klieg lights go dark.

What prompted this president to conduct his Rose Garden show with three unemployed Americans used as props?  Could it be that Nancy Pelosi is hopping mad that this president has not been helping Democrats to get reelected in the fall?  If so, perhaps that was the point of the Rose Garden performance, nothing but election year politics.  And you wonder why the American people are becoming increasingly cynical about their government?

Back on the campaign trail where he feels comfortable that he knows what he is doing, Barack Obama traveled to Las Vegas to stump for Harry Reid.  Harry Reid used to be a boxer and when he told Barack Obama this he said, “Barack, I wasn’t the fastest.  I wasn’t the hardest-hitting, but I knew how to take a punch.”  Based on all the legislation that has been passed since 2008 that an  overwhelming majority of the American people have opposed, makes one wonder if Harry Reid took a few punches too many.

Shortly after taking office and settling into his “bash business” mode Obama blasted businesses for their extravagant meetings held in places like Las Vegas.  Someone then whispered in the president’s ear that extravagant business meetings in Las Vegas were good for Las Vegas and Harry Reid. Oops.  And there you have the crux of the problem.

What, exactly, is government’s role to tell private companies how to spend their money?  What is the role of governments to say to a BP, “Give us the $20 billion, or we’ll take it from you,” as was attributed to Joe Biden, without first going to court?  What is the role of government to say to its citizens, you must buy this health care product or pay a fine?  Well in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, it is probably all fine and dandy, but in America?

Barack, the standup comic, used the analogy that he and Harry Reid had mud on their shoes, were pushing hard to get the car back on the road, and were making progress little-by-little and when they finally got one wheel on the pavement the Republicans want to throw the car into reverse.  Really?  I would compare it more to conservatives telling everyone to get out of the car and help push, instead of waiting for Nancy Pelosi to come back from Dunkin Donuts with free food for all the overweight union bosses jammed in the car squawking that they didn’t do manual labor.  Their contract didn’t call for pushing cars out of ditches. 

So, while this car should have been out of this ditch and well down the road by now, Harry and Barry will try to convince us that what they’re doing is absolutely brilliant; it’s just that we are too stupid to see it.  After all, it took the greatest president in history, FDR, over eight years and a World War to get us out of the Great Depression, so relax we have another 6 ½ years to go.

Imagine what would have happened if the ever resilient American economy was allowed to work on its own without all the government intervention in the 1930s.  Perhaps the Depression would have been shorter like the recession of 1920-1921, and perhaps we would not have had World War II, and Fannie Mae, and a bankrupt Social Security, and a couple of generations later all of us swimming in debt.  It’s time the tow truck of the most powerful economy on the face of the earth to come along and be allowed to do its job.  Tell Harry and Barry to go sit down on that stump over there, and watch how it is really done.  “You’re making a mess of yourselves and embarrassing the rest us.”

I do not like to throw around a charge of mendacity without good reason particularly after listening to the mainstream media and liberal blogosphere accuse Bush of this all day long.  But the more I listen to what comes out of this administration and the actions they take it is getting harder to hold my fire.

Take for example the brouhaha over the immigration law that hasn’t even gone into effect yet in Arizona.  From the start the administration has falsely portrayed the law as racial profiling, but when asked if they had actually read the ten page law, both Attorney General Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano said they had not.  How do people in such senior positions in any administration make such a bold claim without reading what they are opposing?  It begs the question, do they know they are talking about?

The federal government has gone forward and is suing Arizona over the law claiming that it preempts federal law.  But here are some interesting questions:

• If the Arizona law preempts federal law and that is a bad thing, why does the federal government not sue San Francisco and other cities who have openly professed that they are Sanctuary Cities and immigration law will not be enforced therein?
• A recent news report is that there is a law on the books in Rhode Island that is virtually identical to the law in Arizona and it has withstood judicial challenge?  Why isn’t the federal government suing Rhode Island?
• The thrust of the federal government’s pique with the Arizona law is their claim that it is discriminatory.  But this same administration has just ordered that a case be dropped against a radical hate group, the Black Panthers, for putting armed thugs outside a polling place in Philadelphia on Election Day in 2008.  According to six career Civil Rights attorneys in the Justice Department, the case was a slam dunk and they had already gotten a default judgment from the court, but this administration chose to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  The Justice Department’s claim is that the facts did not fit the law.  Anyone who has seen the video of the incident knows that is a bald faced lie.  Is this administration for discrimination or against it?

The latest move by this administration against the rest of us is the recess appointment of Donald Berwick as the head of Medicare.  The lie in this case, is that the Republicans were stalling the appointment for “political purposes.”  Now other presidents have used recess appointments.  Both Clinton and Bush used them many times, however it was typically when they could not get the Senate to act on their nominee.  In this case, Max Baucus (D – MT), had not even scheduled hearings and eleven weeks after the nomination, the administration had not yet completed the nominating paperwork.  So was this action taken because of inaction on the part of the Senate or was the administration lying because they really didn’t want a public debate on Dr. Berwick?

Dr. Berwick has said he is, “Romantic about the National Health Service,” of Britain.  For all the false claims by the Obama Administration that if you are happy with your current health insurance you will be able to keep it, they stealthily appoint a socialized medicine disciple.  Dr. Berwick has also famously said:

 “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

Let’s see, the Obama Administration appoints Dr. Berwick head of Medicare.  Medicare is the health care program for the elderly.  Dr. Berwick is plain about health care rationing and suggests the way to do it is with our eyes open.  While the term “death panel” may have been used by Sarah Palin partially for its shock value to drive home her point, changing the name to a “rationing” panel would make it different in what way?

Here is the key distinction.  In the hands of the individual and their family, they can decide what kind of care they want to provide their loved ones.  They can decide when enough is enough or whether to press on.  In a free market, insurance policies would be true insurance not medical payment plans.  But regardless you would have the liberty to decide.  In this administration’s world, some bureaucrat makes the decision and after they have driven all the alternatives out of business, other than those available to the wealthy, you will have no choice but to succumb to the will of Big Brother.

We are currently surrounded by news of massive government failures in regulation in the areas of finance and the oil industry and we are to believe that they will be superb in running one-sixth of the economy.  Do you believe the lies?

The other day we read reports of Democratic Senators scrambling to create an oversight panel to prevent health care providers from dramatically increasing premiums over the next four years because, shockingly, costs are supposed to go down not up.

Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report analyzing the effects of ObamaCare:

The sobering assessment by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concludes what Republicans had warned about during heated debate — that the double-counting of Medicare spending — as both savings and as a means to shore up the debt-ridden government fund for seniors’ health care — means the cost is unrealistic.

The analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs, raising projected spending by about 1 percent over 10 years, or $311 billion, up from the $222 billion previous estimated.

Excuse me, captain, but was that an iceberg we just hit?  We all know the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage, and it looks like ObamaCare is taking on water only weeks after being launched.  As Congressman John Boehner said:

“According to his own administration’s analysis, the health care law the president signed one month ago today would violate his pledge to ‘bend the cost curve’ and force millions of seniors off their current Medicare coverage. This is in addition to what we already know about how this new law is squeezing employers with job-killing tax hikes and leaving middle-class families to brace for higher premiums,” he said. 

When talk turns to repealing this law is Obama still smugly saying, “Bring it on”?

This is from today’s New York Times:

“Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.”

With the ink barely dry on ObamaCare, Democrats in Congress are scrambling to keep their masterpiece from unraveling.  As I have pointed out repeatedly, there is nothing in the ObamaCare plan that helps reduce the cost of delivering health care.  It is all about controlling what doctors, medical service providers, and insurance companies are paid.  All the underlying pressures on health costs (tort reform, 3rd party payer, etc.) are still in place.

“We Have to Pass the Bill to Know What’s In It”

Nancy Pelosi’s stunning but famous words are coming into play.  Let’s see what has the senators panicked.

• To hoodwink the American people that this abomination is cost effective, ObamaCare warms up by hitting us with four years of taxes before the expensive benefits come into play.
• Every American will be required to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty.  That penalty will initially be $95 per adult in 2014, rising to $695 per adult in 2016 and $2,085 for a family.  This money will be collected by the IRS, not by insurance companies
• Americans cannot be denied coverage for an existing condition

So here’s the scenario.  If you compare the cost of the penalty of $2,085 for a family vs. the cost of insurance for a family of $10,000, coupled with the inability of insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, healthy people will start dropping insurance coverage left and right.  Why not?  On the way to the hospital, you can call an insurance company and say you want to be covered for the pains in your chest and you cannot be denied.  So insurance companies will only have sick people as clients.  With only sick people that they constantly have to pay claims on, their only course of action if they want to stay in business is to raise premiums on all those sick people.  If they start doing it now, they may be able to raise them less than if they wait until 2016.

So the insurance companies are acting rationally to this mess the Democrats dragged across the finish line and now they are shocked, SHOCKED, that they should do this. 

Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a research center that advocates free-market health policies, said the Democrats’ proposal was unlikely to succeed in lowering insurance costs.

“Capping premiums without recognizing the forces that are driving up costs would be like tightening the lid on a pressure cooker while the heat is being turned up,” Mrs. Turner said.

The Democratic fix is to have a new bureaucracy that will provide a check on unjustified premiums.  I think you can look at this in one of two ways, both plausible.  The Democrats were stupid enough to believe, as they typically do, that Americans don’t act rationally to their government policies.  It’s also why they don’t understand that when they raise taxes they never collect as much money as they thought, and when taxes are cut they can’t believe how much money flows into the Treasury due to economic growth.  The second scenario is this new commission will cap premiums to the point of driving private insurance companies out of business and then the Democrats will say, “Geez, we didn’t want to do this, but I guess we have to put in place a public option that, by the way, will be the only option.”

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said: “Health insurance companies’ profits for one year equal about two days of health care spending in the United States. So even if we were to take away all the profits of the so-called greedy insurance companies, that would still leave 363 days a year when health care costs are expanding at a rate our country cannot afford.”

Now that I think about it, it is probably the second scenario that is more likely, that is, force the public option.  Your government is about to swallow up another big chunk of the economy if  we don’t turn them out in November.

I received an e-mail from Congressman Tim Bishop to tell those on his mailing list that we are better off this tax day.  Having stood with thousands of fellow Tea Party protesters, a very polite crowd I might add, I don’t share his mirth.  So I penned him the following reply:

Dear Congressman Bishop,

 I received your e-mail today with the subject line, “Better Off This Tax Day”.  That is a statement I find both bold and curious.  It is a statement that you seem to share with President Obama who was surprised that the Tea Party gatherings were not organized to blow him a kiss and say “thank you.”  I would like to address some of the points in your e-mail.

You begin by saying, “There is bipartisan agreement that tax cuts help spur economic growth…”  Well, yes and no.  I agree as do many conservatives that less taxes are good for both our liberty and our economy.  But to be truly effective, the tax cuts have to give the individual the greatest freedom to use their money as they see fit, after all it is their money being given to the government and not the other way around.  Tax cuts are least effective when used to encourage people to engage in some specific activity the government wants them to do.  In other words, the tax cuts should go toward growing the economy, not getting politicians re-elected.

As you know, the unemployment rate stands at 9.7%.  A year ago President Obama told us, in the strongest of terms, that it was imperative that we pass a $787 billion stimulus package.  If we did not pass that package the unemployment rate would rise to 9%, whereas if it was passed the unemployment rate would peak at 8%.  That’s $787 billion to restrain the unemployment rate by 1%.  Conservatives disagreed that this would work.  It didn’t work.  Not only was the unemployment rate not capped at 8%, it went above the “do nothing” case of 9%.  Now we have $787 billion dollars that we have to pay back and it got us exactly nothing, other than the new Obama administration “metric” of “jobs saved” which no one outside of the administration or Democratic party knows how to measure.

Let me take a moment to address some of the specific tax breaks you are touting.

• Making Work Pay tax credit – this works out to about $8 per week for a taxpayer.  Where I live in the district, this won’t buy a pizza.  If I team up with my wife, it may.  So pardon me if I don’t get too jazzed up about this.
• The rest of the tax breaks are all great if you have income to take them against.  The problem is 9.7% unemployment and you and this administration seem to be working on anything but putting people back to work.

Tax cuts that actually spur the economy and create growth and jobs are tax cuts at the margins.  Cut the marginal tax rates for everyone, even the evil rich people who pay 70% of the total taxes.  Congressman as much as you hate to read this, when people in the upper income brackets get a tax cut, they do not put the money under their mattress.  They spend it or they invest it, both of which lead to job creation.  When jobs are created, people have income and they start spending and then maybe some of the tax cuts you are boasting about will be meaningful, but until then they are just brochureware that is something that looks nice in your campaign literature, but is otherwise meaningless.

Instead of doing what worked in the 1980s and 1990s, this administration insists on doing what didn’t work in the 1930s.  It’s time for this administration to propose something that might actually work and then you may see bipartisanship in support of that proposal instead of bipartisan opposition.

After receiving one too many e-mails, post cards and other marketing pitches to extoll the virtues of ObamaCare, I felt compelled to send the following letter to Congressman Tim Bishop.

Dear Congressman Bishop,

 Judging by the e-mails and mail pieces the marketing program now begins.  To tell the 50%-60% of Americans who adamantly opposed ObamaCare, now that it has been signed into law, what good medicine it really is.  Before I point out the areas on which we disagree, I would first like to call for a sense of honesty in the debate on healthcare.  I applaud you for such honesty where you say on your glossy postcard that it was prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense. I challenge you, however, on your opening sentence.

You begin your piece by stating, “On March 21^st, we stood up to big insurance companies and passed health care reform.”  Really?  How is using the full coercive power of the federal government to unconstitutionally force millions of Americans to buy the products of these big insurance companies, whether they want to or not, standing up to them?  I’ll bet Wal-Mart wishes you would get tough with them and require all Americans to shop there on Thursdays.  Are you next going to get tough with GM and Chrysler by passing legislation forcing us to buy a Malibu or a Ram pickup truck?  Of course you will probably smack them around and make them comply with tougher CAFE standards, but hey, that’s what big government is for, no?

I am still waiting to find out how spending $1-$2 trillion dollars results in reducing the deficit by $143 billion in the first decade.  This may be presumptuous but I have a suggestion on how to lower the deficit by $1-$2 trillion.  Repeal ObamaCare and start over.

Nothing in this legislation actually goes to the root cause of reducing the cost of delivering health care.  It’s all giant shell game about hiding whose pocket the money is coming from to really pay for the same old broken system.  Here are some of the “benefits” you point out in your mail piece:

•  Free Preventive Care Under Medicare – this eliminates co-pays and deductibles under Medicare. This doesn’t reduce what it costs medical professionals to deliver preventive medicine, it just lowers the price to consumers.  Economics 101 says when you decreases the price the demand goes up.  By eliminating co-pays and deductibles, someone has to make up this modest difference.  It is either the medical professional who has to eat the cost, driving up rather than reducing the cost of preventive care, or it will be subsidized by the rest of us through taxes.  You are betting that if every senior gets preventive care, more expensive treatments will be avoided later.  The real question is: how many seniors are not getting preventive care because they don’t have a $20 co-pay and of that group, how many turn out to have a serious disease that could have been prevented?  This is a much smaller group than all seniors.  You cannot make seniors go to the doctor for preventive care if they don’t want to, whether it is free or not. 
• Free Preventive Care Under New Private Plans– When I had my own small business, I provided our employees with healthcare.  I chose a plan that provided free preventive health care.  When I left that business and went out on my own, I tried to buy the same plan privately.  It had a high deductible, HSA account, and free preventive care.  Such plans are available, but not in New York unless you have poverty level income.  The marketplace has these plans available.  Government regulations prevent me from buying them.  Why do we need to spend $1-$2 trillion to give me a plan that the marketplace already provides if government will just get out of the way?
• Ensuring Value for Premium Payments – This is where you require plans to spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on medical services.  How does this control costs?  If the underlying costs increase 100%, does it make us feel warm inside that the 100% increase in premiums that will follow will go 80% toward medical expenses?  It’s still an increase in premiums of 100%.

 Let me stop analyzing your mail piece here.  Doctors are threatening to leave the medical practice because of this legislation which will lead to rationing. This plan does not address the underlying problem.

There is a simple way to reform health care by controlling the underlying cost of delivering medical care, rather than mandating more and more coverage and expense paid for by someone else.  We all pay in the end.  Here is a simpler way that does not cost $1-$2 trillion dollars but may take some of that courage you boasted about in your opening sentence. 

1. Eliminate 3^rdparty payer.  If you invite me to dinner and you tell me that you’re picking up the tab and I am handed a menu with no prices on it, look out!  It’s gonna hurt.  Americans are smart consumers.  They will spend hours researching a car or flat screen TV before buying, because it’s coming directly out of their pocket.  They play a role in how much they pay.  That’s how markets work.  We do not have a free market in health care.  The way to do this is with high deductable insurance plans and Health Savings Accounts (HSA).  If you take the lower cost of the premium for the insurance piece and add the amount to fund the HSA, the costs are about the same as the premium alone on a traditional plan.  I went from a $10,000 annual premium for a traditional plan to a $5,000 premium cost for a high deductible with a $5,000 contribution to the HSA account.  If you want to help people with deal with the high deductable, help them fund the HSA accounts, but keep the buying decision in their hands.  Trust me, they will ask questions, they will shop around, because it’s their money and the less they spend, the more they keep.  Many HSA accounts have a provision to roll money over into an IRA if the account grows large.  This will take guts to implement because the public will have to be educated that they will come out ahead when they have the liberty to make their own choices.  You seem tough enough to ignore the will of the people to implement what you feel is good for them, why not implement something that will actually work?
2. Implement tort reform.  Not an experiment here or there.  If you want to show how tough you really are, stand up to the trial lawyers who fill Democratic coffers.  Implement the system they have in Britain.  No contingency fees and loser pays.  Maybe I’ll stop seeing commercials on my TV that promote a new drug, followed by a come on from a law firm to call them if you actually took the drug because, “you may be entitled to compensation.”  I have no problem with a person getting compensated when they have been harmed through the fault or negligence of a company.  Human life is not perfection.  We are all different.  Some of us can eat three eggs a day and never have a heart problem, others may look at a pat of butter and feel pains in their chest.  Lawyers shouldn’t get rich because humans are not perfect and companies can be bluffed into paying these extortionists rather than defending the case on the merits.  Lawyers  should get paid for the time they put into a case.  OB/GYN doctors are leaving the practice in droves because they cannot afford the malpractice insurance premiums.  Doctors are practicing defensive medicine ordering every possible test for fear they will be asked later, if a patient gets worse, why they didn’t order that other test.  When you add the cost of malpractice insurance on top of the cost of additional tests and procedures, it doesn’t get cheaper to deliver health care and you are not necessarily delivering better health care.  Let the doctors practice medicine, tell the lawyers to stop running a lottery.
3. Buy insurance across state lines.  As indicated previously, the plan I want to buy is available, but not in New York.  The market sees a need for such a product, I want to buy such a product, the government says no.  You want me to believe that now if we spend $1-$2 trillion the government will solve my problems.  Get the government out of my way, thank you very much.
4. Have more tailored insurance policies.  Why, as I approach the golden years, do I have to buy a health insurance policy that covers pre-natal care? In vitro fertilization? Sex change operations?  When I buy automobile insurance, I have about a dozen choices in every category about the kind of coverage I want.  How much deductible?  Do I want rental car reimbursement?  Roadside assistance?  Yet when choosing a health care policy, if I have a choice at all, it is a total package, take it or leave it.  Who decides what has to be included?  Is it me or the government regulators?  If I want to have free preventive care, fine let me choose that and adjust the premium accordingly.  If I want to pay the co-pay for free preventive care, give me that choice.  If we had more choices, as in a free market, costs will go down.  If the government says, everyone must take this, there is no competition and costs climb.
5. Control illegal immigration – If emergency room costs are driving up health care costs for all, and illegal immigrants use the emergency room as their primary care provider then it would follow if you controlled illegal immigration you would drive down health care costs.  Milton Friedman, the great economist, believed in open borders.  However, he also said you can’t have open borders and a welfare state.  It doesn’t work.
6. We need to have Medicare reform.  When Medicare passed the government projected that hospital coverage would grow to $9 billion by the early 1990s.  It actually grew to $66 billion a 700% error in their projection.  We hear again that we are going to crack down on Medicare and Medicaid fraud and this time we really, really mean it.  Estimated at nearly $100 billion per year in waste and fraud, why can’t this be done without spending $1-$2 trillion?

 What you and this Congress passed is a disaster.  If the projections on this monstrosity “miss” by 700% like they did on Medicare, where do we go for a bail out?  Who is going to bankroll that one?  Your children?  Your grandchildren?  The six items I laid out cost next to nothing, why not try them first?  You can always go back later and say we need to do more.  But with ObamaCare, it could be a runaway train that no one can stop.  It is a giant shell game.  It doesn’t address the underlying cost of providing medical care, it only hides whose pocket is getting picked to pay the bill.

Sincerely yours,

The marketing juggernaut is just getting warmed up, but instead of standing fascinated while your Congressman plays 3-card Monty, ask him or her the tough questions.  Ask them calmly, respectfully, and don’t let them dance.  If they dodge your question, ask it again.  If they don’t… fire them in November.

In an article titled, “An Article of Faith,” Charles M. Blow of the New York Times explains about Obama and Health Care.  I am glad he took the time to set down the statist’s case.  It much easier to expose them when they step into the sunlight.

“The Apostles of Anger {that’s us} in their echo chamber of fallacies have branded him the enemy. This has now become an article of faith. Obama isn’t just the enemy of small government and national solvency. He’s the enemy of liberty.”

Enemy, noun, persons that are hostile to one another.

Sounds like Mr. Blow is onto something there.  Let’s see poll after poll has the American people opposed to ObamaCare by around 55% to 60%.  President Obama shows his hostility to the American people by saying he doesn’t care what they think, he, President Obama, knows what’s best for them and will ram this thing through by gimmicks such as reconciliation rather than the normal approval process.  Yes, I guess that makes him an enemy, but it was accomplished through his own actions, not by talk radio or Fox News.

Liberty, noun, freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.

Again, it looks like Mr. Blow nails it.  We have the government under ObamaCare telling us we have to buy insurance or pay a tax or go to jail for non-payment of taxes.  Sounds pretty arbitrary and despotic to me.  So President Obama has decided to act in a way that makes us his enemy.  I guess Mr. Blow is trying to say we are to be faulted for recognizing it?

“This underscores the current fight for the soul of this country. It’s not just a tug of war between left and right. It’s a struggle between the mind and the heart, between evidence and emotions, between reason and anger, between what we know and what we believe.”

Uh-oh, here it comes folks the statist is about to point out how stupid we are for not going along like sheep to slaughter.  Notice the word order first it’s left then right.  If you follow that order Mr. Blow is trying to say that the left stands for the mind, the evidence, reason and what we know, while the right stands for heart, emotions, anger, and beliefs.  I am sure Mr. Blow will now use his superior intellect to explain this all to us knuckle dragging troglodytes.

“This conflict was captured in a tit-for-tat between Obama and Rush Limbaugh. In an interview with CBS this week, Obama complained about the “vitriol” coming from the likes of Limbaugh: ‘I think the vast majority of Americans know that we’re trying hard, that I want what’s best for the country.’

“Limbaugh shot back on Friday, “I and most Americans do not believe President Obama is trying to do what’s best for the country.”

That’s pretty weak.  So despite 55% to 60% of the American people, for months on end, saying or should I say screaming NO! this is not what we want, Mr. Obama is saying as if to a small child, “There, there now, take your medicine, I know what’s best for you.”  Where Mr. Limbaugh is humble  enough not to claim god-like omniscience that he knows what people think, just that based on his observations of the polls, what he believes they think.  It sounds like Mr. Blow is making a case for Mr. Obama being the most arrogant president in our history.  Please continue.

“And there it was. Obama’s language focused on what people “know,” or should know. He seems to find comfort in the empirical nature of knowledge. It’s logical. Limbaugh’s language focused on what he thinks people “believe.” Beliefs are a more complicated blend of facts, or lies, and faith. And, they can exist beyond the realm of the rational.”

Really?  Is Mr. Blow serious?  Does he believe this or does he know this?  Of what knowledge are you speaking Mr. Blow, in which President Obama takes warm comfort?  Is it the empirical knowledge that estimates of what Medicare would cost when it was passed turned out to be understated by 700%?  Is it the empirical knowledge that the model for ObamaCare up in Massachusetts has not stopped costs from increasing and health care is being rationed?  Of course, when Mr. Blow speaks of the right and their beliefs he has to work “lies” into the formula of the “complicated blend of facts, lies and faith.”

“According to another Quinnipiac poll released last week, Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to say that they follow public affairs most of the time. But how? They listen to people like Limbaugh, and they’re more likely than others to watch Fox News.”

Let me call your Quinnipiac poll and raise you one.  In its daily poll on the president Rasmussen finds that while 53% of likely voters disapprove of the job President Obama is doing, 55% of the media write favorable articles about him and that is on a downward trend!  So if people want the truth, who should they turn to for their news, the New York Times perhaps?  I think your article just answered that question.

“But invectives are not information. For example, a poll released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Center found that most Republicans say that they still don’t understand how the new health care reform will affect them and their family.”

Republicans still don’t understand???  Nobody understands it, Mr. Blow, because nobody read it before it passed Congress.  At over 2,500 pages, if you did nothing else but read the bill in the seventy two hours it was posted in the internet, it is not likely you could have read it.  No sleeping, no eating, no lavatory breaks, just three straight days of reading it and you would be hard pressed to get all the way through.  Since you are such a fan of empirical evidence, when major companies announced billions in write-offs because of the bill and the legal requirement to so report, Congressman Henry Waxman appeared shocked and called for hearings.  When Congressman Anthony Weiner said the IRS would not be checking on whether or not you had health insurance, he couldn’t explain why the law funds 16,000 more IRS agents.  This circus is only starting my friend.

And so, my fellow imbeciles, Mr. Blow has spoken with a scathingly inept defense of all things Obama, making the case for a strong turnout at the Tea Parties on April 15 at the very same time. If you want to know the news watch Fox, if you believe you want to house train your dog, get the New York Times.