Archive for November, 2009

During the health-care debate one example the liberals consistently tout is Massachusetts mandated health insurance, which includes a public option. They claim Massachusetts blazed the pathway to better, cheaper health-care. If only we model our national system after Massachusetts’ all will be saved. The small problem is the Last Best Hope to save this country from the evils of health care has been an epic failure.

The Massachusetts’ health care package promised to lower costs – instead it has escalated them. This should come as no surprise. Very few government programs ever met their cost projections. The reason in Massachusetts was simple: the government underestimated the number of people who would require subsidies to be able to purchase the government’s mandated plans. As Boston University professor Alan Sager described the misconception, “Romney won acceptability by obscuring how much money is really needed in the absence of genuine cost controls.”

Even as the costs of the program continue to skyrocket, the expected savings have yet to materialize. The state planned on seeing hundreds of millions of dollars in savings as poor people would no longer seek medical care without any way to pay. Oops, almost none of that money has been saved as the number of uninsured remains high.

The Massachusetts government, facing an economic black hole, had to do something – that something has been to ration health care and jack up premiums. The official sanitized phrase for rationing is “capitated.” This means that Massachusetts mandates that health-care providers will be given limited dollars per patient for all their care.[i] No projections have been made on the effect of this rationing but rocket science is not required to see this will result in reduced quality and quantity of care. During a meeting of The Committee to Reduce Deaths, the prominent Doctor David Fields claimed that capitation is the same as the hated managed care that withheld care from patients. Capitation is “the worst thing that ever happened to medicine.”[ii] Harsh words.

Their second brilliant idea has been to increase the costs of premiums. But by mandating that everyone have health insurance, even a slight increase in premiums can have a huge financial impact on lower income families who are already cash-strapped. But with the state health care plan burning a $300 million dollar hole in the government’s pocket something has to be done.

Many times, liberals have promised their health-care plan will increase coverage, reduce costs, all the while maintaining the standard of care American’s currently receive. This seems too good to be true. What common sense told us long ago, the vaunted Massachusetts’ health-care program confirmed. It is impossible to perform all three goals – if costs and coverage are to increase, the standard must decrease. The Massachusetts plan worsened their health-care system. Do we want Massachusetts’ headache to be our national nightmare?

[ii] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574501261650483596.html

What could the United States do with $300 Billion?  Well considering we’re teetering on the edge of bankruptcy…a lot. For instance, start to dig our way out of the mountain of debt currently being piled on our heads. But that’s only if some Republican Senators get their way.

TARP, aka the Troubled Asset Relief Program, aka the Wall Street Bailout, aka How to Waste Billions of Dollars and Alienate Voters, is set to expire at the end of the year. The $700 billion TARP bill was originally passed to help stabilize a banking sector that many analysts feared was on the verge of collapse. However, as with all things that bureaucracy gets their grubby little hands on, the original purpose became lost in corruption and waste. As Senator John Thune described the program, “TARP has become little more than a slush fund for the Treasury Department to pick winners and losers among private businesses in this country.”

Fortunately, $317.3 billion dollars has yet to be wasted and the program is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2009. Unfortunately, the legislation allows the Secretary of Treasury to extend TARP through Oct. 3, 2010. Republican Senators Thune (R-SD) and Bennett (R-UT) have taken the lead to ensure the wasteful program isn’t given new life, introducing a bill which would prevent the extension of TARP past the New Year’s Eve deadline.  The bill, better known as the TARP Sunset Act, has already attracted some high profile supporters, featuring non-profits like the National Taxpayers union, Americans for Prosperity, and Americans for Tax Reform.

Although the economy remains sluggish, the lending freeze for which TARP was hastily conceived is behind us. As Senator Bennett explained, “[The] crisis has passed and the usefulness of TARP therefore is over,” said Bennett. “The Obama administration is using TARP like a revolving credit account and treating it as a permanent addition to the national deficit.”

Unsurprisingly the Treasury and some Democratic Senators have come out against the Sunset Act. Sen. Tim Johnson has said that, “the Treasury needs more flexibility in the TARP program.”

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. We’ve already seen how taxpayer money was spent – taking ownership positions in firms, paying hundreds of millions in bonuses to executives, and generally increasing the role of government in the private sector.

It is time to take Treasury’s hands out of the cookie jar and allow the remaining unallocated money to go towards propping up another institution that is on the verge of financial catastrophe, the United States of America.  Let us use this money to start paying down the debt the Democrats are accumulating at a record pace and let’s stop reckless spending of money we do not really have.

Yesterday we cited seven states in which the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board had listed false information on jobs created by the economic stimulus. We slightly underestimated the depth of the problem. Watchdog.org, a collection of independent journalists covering state and local activity, now reports the problem extends to all 50 states, in 440 phantom districts, accounting for $6.4 billion. To clarify, the entire U.S. only has 435 actual Congressional districts, meaning that either the U.S. has doubled in size in a matter of weeks, or someone has a lot of explaining to do.

Among the most ridiculous aspects of the transparency project is:

American Somoa, which despite not being a state, was given three congressional districts on top of the stimulus funds that it received.

Or as Watchdog writes,

More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

Many other recipients carried the banner for congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina’s 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia’s 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion–it received more than $2 million, according to recovery.gov.

The problem does not stop with phantom districts, it extends to phantom jobs. According to the Washington Examiner, which has compiled reports from eleven major newspapers, more than 75,000 bogus jobs have been created or saved by the stimulus.

Some of the funnier reports, (we’re trying to find humor in wasting billions of dollars):

• KY: a shoe-store owner claimed he created nine jobs on an $889.60 contract. In reality, he supplied nine pairs of shoes to the Army Corps of Engineers
• TX: a month long roofing project that received less than $30,000 in stimulus funds and involving six workers was reported as creating 450 jobs
• WI: the county’s report claimed to have created 100 jobs with its $7.3 million grant, but that’s only because the true figure of five jobs was mistaken for 50 and then double-counted.
• GA: The Southwest Georgia Community Action Council claimed to have saved 935 jobs with the $1.3 million it received, even though only 508 people work there. It now says it created 9.35 jobs.

How much of this is truly an accident versus a deliberate misinformation campaign is hard to tell. Regardless of the motivation, it underscores the fundamental problem with counting on the government to efficiently spend our money. These are not the people we want running health care.

CPAC 2010

Registration for the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference is now open.  The 37^th annual conference is scheduled to take place February 18-20 2010 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Conservative activists from all over the country will gather for the annual conference to hear a lineup of influential conservative speakers. Anticipation for the upcoming conference has been rising as Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio has recently been confirmed as the keynote speaker. CPAC Director Lisa De Pasquale recently made the announcement.

“We chose Rubio because he is an upcoming leader. He is someone that a lot of people are excited about,” De Pasquale told POLITICO. “His name keeps getting brought up, and we decided that he would be a good keynote for 2010.”

Other invited speakers include Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Hon. Mitt Romney, Hon. Sarah Palin, Rep. Ron Paul, Amb. John Bolton, Ann Coulter, Hon. Newt Gingrich, Hon. Mike Huckabee, Gov. Bobby Jindal, Rush Limbaugh, Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell and many more.

To register now for CPAC visit the site: www.cpac.org

As if the stimulus could get any less stimulating, the Washington Post reported today that millions of taxpayers will have to repay part of the credit they received from the Democratic Economic Stimulus Bill.

The tax credit, known as the “Making Work Pay” program, was encouraged by President Obama to relieve the tax burden on 95% of working families. The savings, as much as $400 for individuals and $800 for couples, came in the form of increased weekly pay as a result of fewer withheld taxes. The idea behind the cut was to increase the amount of disposable money in an attempt to supr the economy.

The President made the refund program one of the keys of his early agenda saying,

Across America, families like the people who join me have had tough choices forced upon them because of this economic downturn. . . And that’s why my administration has taken far-reaching action to give tax cuts to the Americans who need them, while jump-starting growth and job creation in the process. We start from the simple premise that we should reduce the tax burden on working people, while helping Americans go to college, own a home, raise a family, start a business and save for retirement.

Except, now he’d like some of that money back please. It seems as though the “Making Work Pay” program forgot to take into account some elementary facts about taxpayers, such as…they may hold two jobs. (Again, are these really the people we want crafting an entirely new system of health care?) However, the glitch may hit home especially hard for some students. As the Huffington Post describes,

[A] single student with a part-time job gets a $400 boost in pay. However, if students are claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, they don’t qualify for the credit and would have to repay it when they file their returns.

College students, which are already financially squeezed by loans and a schedule which makes paid work difficult, could find themselves in trouble come April. Young adults are essentially doubly worse off. We were given money and told to spend it to help boost the economy. But 9 months later and there are no new jobs, the economy is still in the dump, and now we have to pay back money we already spent because of a government error. If the stimulus was a failure, I can’t wait to see how taking money out of the hands of consumers is going to work.

Better stock up on the Ramen.

$1.2 trillion dollars is a ridiculous amount of money. It is also difficult for many young people to fully grasp just how much it is. With a little bit of perspective, perhaps everyone will realize just how careful we must be before we rush into a mistake that could cost our generation dearly (both literally and figuratively).

For instance, with $1.2 trillion dollars we could:

• Provide scholarships to over 40,000,000 students  - allowing them to attend college full time for four years
• Cover the cost of textbooks for more than 4,800,000,000 students during a semester of college
• Equal the entire Gross Domestic Product of India, the second most populous nation in the world
• Buy 1,500,000,000,000 McDonalds hamburgers
• Purchase 15,380,000,000 barrels of oil – enough to supply all of the US’ needs for about 770 days
• Build more than 245,000 schools for students all over the country
• Pay the entire team salary of the New York Yankees for 5,769 years
• Represent the equivalent of the median household income of 24 million U.S. families
• Have over 20,000 times the net worth of Bill Gates
• Build 1.2 million of Jerry Jones’ new state of the art football stadiums, which would together seat over 120 billion fans
• Fund the military efforts of the entire world for a year
• Make a stack of one dollars bills that would reach 90,000 miles high, or wrap around the earth more than 3 ½ times
• Have enough money to give everyone in the world $179.10, or give everyone in the United States about $4,000
• Provide Thanksgiving dinners for a family of four to 70 billion families – enough for the entire world to celebrate for more than 10 years

In other words…it’s a ton of cash. Young people should be at the forefront of the debate, making sure that for this kind of money we are solving the problem. After all, its our generation who is going to be footing the bill.

Transparency FAIL. Recovery.gov was created, by its own words,

“[T]o foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made available in this Act. . . . Given its primary mandate – to allow taxpayers to see precisely what entities receive Recovery money in addition to how and where the money is being spent.”

It was even created by the Orwellian sounding “Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.” Implicit in all of this transparency is that the data would be correct. Oops.

As Fox News reports,

“[T]he Web site reported that 30 jobs were saved or created with $761,420 of federal stimulus spending in Arizona’s 15th Congressional District. One problem with the claim — the state has only eight districts

The site also lists 12 other non-existent districts in Arizona where jobs were reportedly saved or created. It also lists imaginary districts in at least three other states, including Oklahoma, Iowa, and Connecticut.”

Apparently the problem extends beyond the original four states, As reported by the Heritage Foundation,

“In Minnesota’s 57th Congressional District, 35 jobs have been saved or created using $404,340 in stimulus funds. In New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District, 25 jobs have been saved or created using $61,000 in stimulus cash. And in Arizona’s fighting 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending.”

But perhaps my favorite in this series of ridiculousness comes from the Huffington Post which reports,

“The stimulus Web site reported that 50 jobs were created or saved by an Arkansas cemetery’s purchase of a lawnmower for roughly $1,000.”

Criticism is coming from all angles, Even Democratic Rep. Dave Obey, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, is piling on, saying “credibility counts in government and stupid mistakes like this undermine it. . . Whether the numbers are good news or bad news, I want the honest numbers and I want them now.”

This would all be laugh-out-loud hilarious IF this didn’t cost us $787 billion dollars. For that kind of price-tag we ought to be able to see honestly and correctly exactly what we, the American taxpayers, bought. With talks of a second round of stimulus whirling around Capitol Hill, young adults must pressure their Congressmen for accurate reporting of the job figures. Its increasingly becoming clear that the stimulus failed, but Democrats in 2010 should not be able to seek cover behind faulty and imaginary job numbers.

For a more detailed look into state by state misreporting of job figures, I urge you to take a look at this interactive map put together by the Washington Examiner.

Never have I experienced such an awesome display of courage, servitude, work ethic, and pure fun! I knew what needed to be done in Virginia. I knew what a great challenge this was. It was such an awesome time. I went through so much. I laughed. I cried (Maybe not so much cried). I experienced so much craziness, and all in the name of Bob McDonnell and his mission.

So, on Sunday when we got there, Mr. Walsh, wasted no time getting us trained and on those phones. It seems, though, as the days went by, we just made MORE and MORE calls every night. I believe the first night we made around 4,000 phone calls. On the second night 7,000 and on the third night over 13,000.  I’ve been chased by dogs, cursed at by old ladies, shouted down by 12 yr. olds… and I would do it again.

I loved it! I loved the drivers (Especially John!). I loved the crazy experiences. Like on Monday when I involuntarily decided to go for a jog when I was in front of everyone and being mercilessly chased by a dog that definitely didn’t want me shaking its master’s hand. That was embarrassing. I could just sort of make out Jonathon Snyder’s face while he was laughing from inside the safety of the van while I was frantically running FOR MY LIFE. It was all just to fun though!!! Thanks for letting me serve!
–
Gannon D. E. Nickell
Deputy Political Director, Ohio College
Republican Federation

Politico has a great story out today that should serve as a warning to President Obama: BE BIPARTISAN. It doesn’t seem that hard to grasp, but then again this is a President who likes to refer to what he is doing as “unprecedented.”

The need for bipartisanship becomes even more important when it is legislation that fundamentally affects the way Americans live their lives. After all, these laws will be enforced against people across the political spectrum so it makes sense that we should at least attempt to seek some common ground.

Nevertheless, the President and Democratic led Congress have already enacted one party-line piece of legislation (the economic stimulus) and stands poised to do it again on health care reform. As Politico points out, the partisan nature of these two bills stand out against the bipartisanship of the past 50 years. Consider,

• Civil Rights Bill (1964): With Democrats in control of Congress, and most Southern Democrats opposed, the bill would not have passed without a big chunk of Republican votes. In the House, 136 Republicans voted aye, 27 Republicans in the Senate.

• Medicare (1965): Again, with Democrats in control, 70 House Republicans and 13 Senate Republicans voted for it.

• Welfare Reform (1996): With Republicans in charge of Congress — and a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, pushing for it — 98 House Democrats and 25 Senate Democrats voted in favor. (Moynihan voted against it.)

• No Child Left Behind (2001): While this was a major initiative of Republican President George W. Bush, 43 Senate Democrats and 198 House Democrats voted for it, including now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

• Tax cuts (2001): 12 Senate Democrats and 28 House Democrats voted for the primarily Republican plan.

• Iraq War Resolution (2002): 29 Senate Democrats and 81 House Democrats voted in favor.

• Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (2003): 11 Senate Democrats and 16 House Democrats voted for it. Without them, the measure would have failed.

Democrats seem willing to toss aside any ideas of partisanship in the name of passing their agenda. Politico describes it as a “gamble.” If the 2009 elections were any indications, their dice just came up snake eyes.

For the first time this decade “[m]ore Americans now say it is not the federal government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have healthcare coverage (50%) than say it is (47%). This is merely the latest in the growing pile of evidence that Congress and the President are no longer listening to the people, but instead are following their own agenda. The numbers represent a precipitous drop from late 2006 when 69% of Americans believed health care was the federal government’s responsibility.

Some other interesting figures from the same poll:

• 77% of Republican and Republican “leaners” believe health care is not the government’s responsibility
• 61% of Americans are for “maintaining the current system” of health care – a 13% increase since 2008
• 32% favor replacing the current system with a new government-run health care system – an all-time low since the poll was first taken in 2002
• Democrats are beginning to second guess – a full 35% of Democrats now favor maintaining the current private insurance system

This is a pure and simple example of people thinking the government is a solution until they actually see them in action.  As Gallup stated in their analysis, “the current debate has increased the average American’s awareness as to the nuances of the various roles the government could play in the healthcare system.” In other words, people are beginning to see the small government light. After all, the list of government successes is far shorter than a list of their failures. One need really only look at Medicaid, Social Security, the Indian Health System, or the Post Office to realize that an inexpert government bureaucracy may not be the best way to go about solving society’s problems.

The health care debate currently going on is a microcosm of what is wrong when government gets involved.

1. First, look at the incredible pull that special interests are having on the legislation. The government is having to make less than ideal solutions in order receive the backing of certain lobbies such as the AMA, the AARP, and the drug companies. Although every person is entitled to their say and deserves a health care outcome that suits their needs this is better achieved through the market, not government!
2. Second, imagine the bureaucracy we are seeing in trying to get this legislation passed put between you and your health care. Miles of procedural red tape could stand in the way towards functional and efficient health care delivery. For instance, the bill that passed the House is “paid for” by cutting $500 billion in what Nancy Pelosi described as “waste, fraud, abuse, redundancy, obsolescence and whatever it is.” That’s Medicare – a government run health care program…why should we expect any different with the current legislation! Third, how can we expect life-long politicians and government bureaucrats to come up with a health care solutions. This is a job better left to the businesses
3. Third, government is filled with life-long politicians and bureaucrats – not exactly the experts I expect to solve the health care problem. I’m sure they have all studied the problem, heard from experts, and read the bills but that still doesn’t mean they are equipped to resolve this long-standing and complicated issue. The government (as the poll shows) is overstepping the bounds of their expertise – similar to the problem we can expect when we put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor.

The Democrats are pretty much staking their reputations on big government solutions, eschewing any other ideas, and the American people are noticing and making their voices heard.  Americans have said that they do not trust the government to deal with something as intimate as their health care decisions. It is now up to the government to listen.