Category: national politics & policies

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media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The End—er, ACA—Is Near

First, NBC’s Nightly News anchor Brian Williams reported that the “website for the president’s new health care law is back up tonight after yet another technical problem over the weekend that prevented people from signing up for health insurance . . . yet again.” Then he went on, bemoaning, “For many middle-class Americans who buy their own health insurance, there could be another frustration and that is ‘sticker shock’ — after some learned they must buy new policies that cover more, but cost more as well.”

Couldn’t be. In pushing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama had promised, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

And presumably “afford” your plan, too. (Well, there are good old-fashioned government subsidies!)

Williams then turned to correspondent Peter Alexander, who announced that the absolute catastrophe of the healthcare.gov website “is masking what is the real issue here, how much these plans will actually cost.”

At Forbes weeks ago, the headline to Avik Roy’s column suggested a connection: “Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are.”

A website that crashes to hide the cost of insurance the law demands you purchase seems far-fetched. Next they’ll claim the Administration somehow knew so many folks would lose their insurance policies.

Er, well, “That millions will lose or have to change their individual policies is not a surprise to the administration” noted Alexander.

Say, what?

NBC News found “buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulations language predicting that ‘A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate . . . is 40 percent to 67 percent.’”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies

Wacky Ways to MSNBC the World

Alex Wagner of MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner” fame decided her fellow network hosts had fecklessly failed to exhaust the world’s reservoir of inane 30-second political pronouncements. So, her vignette informs us:

Minimum wage was mentioned in the State of the Union earlier this year and then it wasn’t brought back up again. This should be something we think about and talk about every single week. This is one of those building-block issues that should supersede almost anything else we have. Economic security is foundational to American success.

Where to start?

Perhaps, by wondering if any serious person really thinks the minimum wage is an issue so paramount in the economy that it “should supersede almost anything else we have.”

Er, “we have”? Who’s editing scripts over there?

But let’s cut to the chase: Ms. Wagner is arguing that “economic security” not only comes before “American success,” but is “foundational” to that success.

Hmmmm?

According to the great Wikipedia in cyberspace, “economic security” is “the condition of having stable income or other resources to support a standard of living now and in the foreseeable future.” So, does Wagner really mean to suggest that before Americans were able to achieve success, wealth, we already had guaranteed to us plenty of steady income to finance a fine and dandy standard of living for as far off into the future as we could foresee?

Americans worked hard for this wealth; it wasn’t legislated.

Economic “success” creates economic security, not the other way around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

No Waiting for the Lies

From the beginning, Democrats urged us to reserve judgment about their beloved “Affordable Care Act.” Wait, they said, until enacted . . . “to find out what’s in it.”

Then they said: wait till we see how it works.

Now, they tell us to wait some more, while they figure out how to bring some competence to the “glitch”-ridden healthcare.gov.

Waiting was the thing some folks feared most. The closer the country got to socialized medicine, the more queues, lines, and waiting lists would get set up, as bureaucrats scrambled to prevent disastrous cost overruns. Hobbled with regulations and mandates and increased demand (without properly paying for said demand — such is the way of politicians’ promises), it was never unreasonable to expect that “death by waiting” would eventually become the integral feature (not a bug!) of the new system.

Still, in one thing, there was no wait. Though the president may have been lied to right up until healthcare.gov’s launch — misled about the testing and integrity of the IT system — there was at least one lie known from the beginning as a lie: that we could all keep our current insurance policies.

Considering the extent of Obamacare’s regulations, that was impossible. Only a small set of choices would be available to Americans. Most legacy policies just wouldn’t cut it, short a special waiver from Washington.

Now, hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting cancellation notices from their insurers. Others, more “lucky,” are being informed that their policies will be upgraded to the nearest Obamacare-acceptable alternative, at raised rates.

This is the Honest Truth about Obamacare: Obama lied; his staff lied; Congress lied.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Affordable [sic] Healthcare [sick]

The Pelosi-Obama Affordable Care Act was passed as a pig-in-a-poke. Now with that poke open, with the pig fully emergent as of next year, what do we know about “Obamacare”?

  1. It’s not socialized medicine, but it is heavily regulated- and subsidized-medicine, almost designed not to work. Its inevitable failures will be said to require more government as “fixes,” eventually (some Democrats hope) going all the way to, yes, socialized medicine.

  2. It’s chockfull of new subsidies, which raise medical costs by making demand for services even more inelastic . . . and thus can only increase taxpayer burdens and more strain on budgets. The original reason so many Americans opposed the reform was that promoting a new “entitlement” even as the old entitlements of Social Security and Medicaid teetered further into insolvency was the very opposite of common sense.
  3. It’s filled with new “mandates” at every level, for businesses as well as individuals. A few have been postponed, but the bulk of the increased regulations are indeed going into effect next year. That will generally raise prices.

But by how much? Well, a new all-state study predicts that

insurance premiums will increase under the first year of Obamacare in 45 of 50 states. This finding flies in the face of President Obama’s promise that his health care overhaul would cause premiums “for the typical family” to fall by $2500.

Why the decrease in five states?

Those had already embraced the goofy over-regulations that Democrats just seem to love.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Broken Fix

Washington Government is broken. Everyone — even those limited to a single firing brain synapse — knows as much. But, what to do about it?

Washington scribe Ezra Klein offers “The 13 reasons Washington is failing,” on The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog.”

First on Klein’s list? Earmarks. Really. Yes, the little pork-barrel items stuffed into bills without any debate or serious consideration to boost an incumbent politician by a million or a billion dollars here or there. Klein blames the GOP House for banning earmarks.

“It used to be that Boehner could ask a member to take a tough vote and, in return, help him or her get a bridge built back home,” explains Ezra. “That bargaining chip is gone.”

Our political system desperately needs it back, so we can put the genie back in the Klein bottle. Congressional leaders simply must be able to keep your representative on the take.

But that’s not all. Government is also too transparent, or, as Ezra puts it, “Too much sunshine can burn.”

Sure, effective political bridge-trading needs to be done behind closed doors. Away from the prying eyes of pesky voters.

Klein goes on to lament that, “Big business has lost a lot of its power over the Republican Party.” That’s a problem. Really. Progressives are nonplussed.

And Klein argues “The Republican Party has become particularly extreme” and “Ted Cruz (and others like him) has gained a lot of power over the Republican Party,” before informing readers: “There is no ‘Republican Party.’”

All of which — obviously and unquestionably — explains why Big Government cannot give us nice things. Or so says one insiders’ outsider.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Supreme Politics and Sublime Congress

Former FEC commissar Trevor Potter says the Supreme Court “should get more politically savvy.”

Potter really means the High Court should agree with him, and allow incumbents in Congress to write the campaign finance rules under which they — and their opponents — operate, undisturbed by constitutional review.

Last week, the Court heard McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case concerning Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, who wants to give $1,776 dollars to more candidates. He’s limited, because by law he cannot give over $48,600 to all federal candidates combined.

Why? Apparently those who contribute $48,600 or less to candidates they believe in are pure of heart, but that once that forty-eighth-thousandth-six-hundredth-and-first dollar is donated it can only be devoid of any decent intention, an unquestionable attempt to corrupt our government.

Most observers recognize that such an arbitrary limit is constitutionally suspect and likely to be voided. Including Potter, who is already furious that the Roberts Court has restricted congressional legislation dealing with campaign regulation in all five cases it has thus far considered. Potter accuses it of “judicial hubris” and “contempt for legislative authority” and “a surprising lack of respect for Congress’s expertise on political matters.”

How could “a lack of respect” for Congress be “surprising”?

Speaking of “political savvy,” where’s Potter’s?

Potter concludes that the Supremes “should leave politics to the politicians, who have a better sense of when the intersection of fundraising and lawmaking leads to corruption.”

Sure, politicians have a better sense of that corrupt intersection . . . they’re always there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Something to Protect

Blasé about sweeping government surveillance? Think you have “nothing to hide”?

I bet you do.

Ever draw curtains? You have “something to hide.” If you balk when a con man says, “I need your birthday and Social Security Number,” you have “something to hide.” When you feel comfortable giving certain information about yourself to some persons but not others, you demonstrate your preference to hide some things from some people.

That’s not nothing.

Philosopher Harry Binswanger, however, says he is not worried. “I have no secrets. Those who raise the specter of Big Brother are not on a wrong basic premise, but they are being unrealistic: when and if we fall into the grip of totalitarianism, there will be nothing to stop the dictatorship from spying on us by any means it wishes. Such a regime does not require that the tools have been set up in advance.” Some reining in may be appropriate, but “alarmism” is unwarranted.

It’s warranted.

Totalitarianism doesn’t happen with a flip of the switch. Tyranny works from precedents. Daily encroachments help establish it.

And our government violates our rights in the here and now, in days prior to any fully Orwellian dystopia. The tools usable tomorrow by an American-style GPU or Gestapo to violate our rights can be thus used today by an IRS or NSA.

Our governments snoop on us unwarrantedly today. They hide the extent of their spying on innocent people, today. They have motives to use what they get by their spying — today.

It should stop.

Today.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies

The Apple of Their Own Eyes

“Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it,” President Obama recently told an audience. “I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.”

Acknowledging the many problems that popped up in last week’s rollout of the online healthcare exchanges, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius offered, “[H]opefully you’ll give us the same slack you give Apple.”

Let’s review. Apple fixed its problem. And customers continued to voluntarily purchase its products.

That’s where the president’s and the secretary’s analogy badly breaks down. Obamacare’s problems are myriad and metastasizing . . . and hardly being fixed.

Even Obamacare enthusiasts Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas, writers of The Washington Post’s “Wonk Blog,” objected to the ridiculous comparison between Apple and Obamacare in a story headlined, “Obamacare’s Web site is really bad”:

The Obama administration doesn’t have a basically working product that would be improved by a software update. They have a Web site that almost nobody has been able to successfully use. If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for Tim Cook’s head.

The differences between Apple and Obamacare hardly end there. Did I mention that no one is forced to buy Apple products?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Big Government Blows It

The Obama Administration won’t say how many Americans have successfully navigated the online sign-up during last week’s grand opening of the Affordable Care Act healthcare exchanges . . . if anyone.

To quell the media manhunt, the White House tweeted that Chad Henderson, a mild-mannered 21-year-old Georgia college student with a part-time day-care job, had, through sheer determination of will, managed to sign up for Obamacare at a cost of only 30 percent of his salary.

“I really just wanted to do my part to help out with the entire process,” Henderson said. But Chad was soon found to be hanging out there, suspiciously, finally admitting he hadn’t truthfully grabbed the new entitlement’s brass ring after all.

Chuck Todd announced on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown that it had been a “rough first week” for Obamacare. He wondered how the folks who “brought us the most technologically advanced campaign in history . . . blew it this badly on this — their biggest, most important government outreach?”

“[T]hey really had to get this right,” added National Journal’s Ron Fournier, “not just for the healthcare reform, but for the whole idea — that a lot of us believe in — that a strong, effective government can help people through this huge economic and social transition we’re going through.” Fournier admitted that the failure undermined the “central argument that we’re having in this country.”

Even “objective” media folks, who believe government should play a much larger role in running our lives, aren’t so sure it’s up to the job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies tax policy

Nixoned Nuclear Waste

The federal government, embodied in the U.S. Department of Energy, has been collecting money from ratepayers for three decades, with one set purpose: to pay for the safe disposal of nuclear waste.

And what does it have to show for it?

Nothing. Zip. Nada.

The Energy Department hasn’t done a thing to safely dispose of the spent uranium and other materials from the fission process used in American plants. The Yucca Mountain storage facility, where all this stuff was going to be buried, was nixed a few years ago, by the present Nixer-in-Chief (call him a “Nixon,” why not?) Barack Obama.

All it’s done is collect $37 billion.

You could say it has “hoarded” the money, but, this being the U.S. government, that money’s long been spent. On other, non-nuclear-waste-related items. You know, wars and prescription drugs and Star Trek sets. Vital stuff, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, the nuclear power companies haven’t been sitting still. They’ve been sitting on their own stockpiles of waste — the security for and safety of which has been paid for by a variety of successful lawsuits against the federal government . . . for not picking up the garbage.

Now, there’s a new lawsuit, seeking to enjoin the feds from collecting any more of the funds that they obviously have no intention of spending according to plan.

Breach of contract? Fraud? Government as usual?

You decide.

Meanwhile, we who demand honest government wish the new lawsuit the best of luck.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.