Bernie’s health plan will WORK (and save money!) through (wait for it!)…
GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY!
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Tag: 2016 Presidential race
On Tuesday, former (and perhaps soon to be again) First Daughter Chelsea Clinton attacked Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her mother’s chief rival in the presidential primaries.
“Sen. Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea charged, telling an Iowa audience that he “would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”
The Sanders campaign quickly fired back that the young Clinton was “wrong” and disingenuously ignoring the fact that Sanders would bestow government-paid healthcare coverage on every American. For free! (Unless you happen to pay taxes, that is. Then, it’d be very expensive.)
“It wasn’t an honest attack,” declared Democratic strategist David Axelrod on CNN.
But on ABC, Hillary defended her daughter, doubling-down by arguing, “that’s exactly what he’s proposed. To take everything we currently know as health care, Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP Program, private insurance, now the Affordable Care Act, and roll it together.”
Strange, in 2008, when Hillary was promoting a single-payer system and Barack Obama took issue, Mrs. Clinton decried “tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook,” asking, “Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal healthcare?”
“This is wrong and every Democrat should be outraged,” the 2008 Hillary declared. “So shame on you, Barack Obama!”
Now it’s Hillary Clinton who knows no shame.
“More striking perhaps,” lamented Mark Halperin, a senior political analyst for MSNBC and Bloomberg News, “was a lack of interest that most of the news world had to [Chelsea’s] remarks.”
Maybe when Clintons “dismantle” the truth, it just isn’t news anymore.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The King Canute Memorial Award for Clueless Legislation (Winter 2015 – 16) goes to Senator Bernie Sanders. He had stiff competition from ocean-lowering President Barack Obama, this season, but surely earned it these past few months.
Canute famously warned his advisors that he was no miracle worker. Standing by the sea and commanding the tide to turn only works on a regular schedule — set by natural forces, knowable in advance only after years of careful observation. All the hand-waving, incantations and official edicts cannot change the tide.
The award goes to those most in need of the Full Canute Object Lesson. Sanders’s latest ninnyism begs for just such a lesson: He wants to establish maximum fees for ATMs, down to $2 per transaction.
As everyone knows, some ATMs charge more than others. Why? It is not costless to provide electronic bank inquiries and withdrawals around the country … and the world. And profitability varies.
Supply and demand. Entrepreneurs do not offer these services out of charity. Close off profits in some areas, there will be corresponding effects.
From my experience, transaction fees range from about five bucks down to … Zero.
I usually pay nothing.
Outlawing fees above some arbitrary maximum will almost certainly ensure there will be fewer ATMs — particularly in low-use areas — and might even raise those zero-priced transactions to one- or two-buck fees.
Prices aren’t arbitrary, so no matter how loudly Bernie Sanders sputters “Unacceptable,” price ceilings aren’t magically going to produce the same service at less cost.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Weeks ago, I took Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to task for behaving like rude, dishonest children — she, fibbing about Trump being used in an ISIS recruitment video; he, using a vulgar term to describe her 2008 defeat by President Obama.
The mainstream media is joining the bad behavior, copacetic with “Clinton avoiding the same kind of treatment as Trump,” Callum Borchers informs in his piece headlined: “Does the media have a double standard on Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s embellishments?”
Short answer: Yes.
When Mrs. Clinton made her false accusation, ISIS was actually using her husband, former Pres. Bill Clinton, in a recruitment video. Even with this man-bites-dog angle — astoundingly underreported — Borcher predicts that Hillary will “emerge from this media brush fire unsinged” in no small part because there are “enough … supportive media outlets.”
Now the Post reports that a new 51-minute “propaganda video released by the Somali-based al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabab includes a clip of Trump calling on the United States to bar Muslims from entering the country …”
The story’s lede smears Mr. Trump with guilt by association:
Last month, The Washington Post reported that white nationalists have begun using Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a recruitment tool. Now, the polarizing Republican presidential front-runner has become the recruitment fodder for another group of marginalized extremists.
The Post’s previous article found white supremacists trying to somehow glom on to, but clearly being rebuffed by, Trump. Repeatedly associating the two is gutter journalism. Should we hold our breaths for stories about members of the Revolutionary Communist Party favoring Clinton or Bernie Sanders?
Spare us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Presidential candidate John McAfee is an adventurer. Best known for founding the first successful anti-computer virus company, he has also been shot at in tropical jungles, by men trained by U. S. forces, with American-bought guns. This range of experience makes him the most interesting presidential hopeful, bar none.
His big issue is cyber-security. He thinks Americans have placed themselves in a too-precarious position. As he sees it, the war on terror has served as a grand distraction from the real threat, a prime example of doing foreign policy and national security completely upside-down wrong.
He has a point.
But he’s neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and not long ago he realized that his own Cyber Party didn’t have the oomph to get him on the ballot in enough states.
So he has announced his candidacy for the Libertarian Party nomination.
Why? He’s obviously not a libertarian in any strict capital‑L sense. But the septuagenarian insists that he has been a libertarian at heart since before the word entered common use.
This is what the Libertarians get for their most obvious success: obtaining and keeping ballot status in more states for more election cycles than any other “minor party.”
Think of the Libertarian Party as the host, and one-time Republicans like former Congressman Bob Barr and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson — and now McAfee — as viruses, aiming to commandeer the host’s operating system.
Of course, one might also view the LP as a virus attempting to do the same to the federal government.
Shall we root for the viruses, for once?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Senator Bernie Sanders gave us a big present last week. In one simple “tweet” he warbled out the essence of his socialism: “You have families out there paying 6, 8, 10 percent on student debt but you can refinance your homes at 3 percent. What sense is that?”
That’s what he broadcast. That’s what this self-proclaimed socialist wrote — or allowed his staff to write — on his official Twitter account, @SenSanders.
And it is not as if he had the excuse of haste. He was repeating a thought from his presidential campaign account in September: “It makes no sense that students and their parents pay higher interest rates for college than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages.”
To the earlier post, Twitter erupted in criticism. The gist? Have you never heard of collateral, sir?
Lenders can charge less on secured loans because, in case of default, the recourse is to take the collateral, the car or house, thereby recouping the loss.
But an unsecured loan? Well, by law one cannot easily slough off student loans — but one can simply not pay, or pay late. Hence the higher rates.
From its beginnings, socialism — and progressivism and Fabianism and fascism and social democracy, following — has been fueled by complaints about markets.
Without showing any understanding of the logic of markets.
Which is why, when put into practice, socialistic and interventionist programs produce such great amounts of negative collateral effects. Socialism is the philosophy of good intentions that yields collateral damage worse than the problems meant to be solved.
Oh, Bernie Sanders! Your initials say so much.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
First, Hillary lied. She said that ISIS was using Trump in terrorism recruitment videos. The Donald responded with contemptuous ridicule, using a vulgar word for her 2008 defeat by Barack Obama.
Then, the Democratic Party presidential contender got all teary-eyed and said we had to treat each other with more respect, be nicer.
This is presidential politics?
Mrs. Hillary Clinton and Mr. Donald Trump are both addicted to telling whoppers. Their “stretchers” are now the everyday stuff of our nightly news.
Mrs. Clinton’s fact-less charge that Trump was being used in recruitment videos is all the more ridiculous considering that Mr. Clinton does star in such a video. Maybe she meant merely that Mr. Trump’s call for barring Muslim immigration will help ISIS paint America as anti-Muslim, telling the tall tale because, well, it “ seems true.” Even if it isn’t.
In this, she differs not a whit from Mr. Trump, who not too long ago “remembered” “seeing” “thousands” of “Muslims” in “New Jersey” celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 — a video he cannot produce, either.
Politicians hyperbolize from bigotry to factoid all the time. What’s new is Trump’s foul calumny, in response, and Clinton’s painting of Trump as a bully for belittling her. That’s not how I remember politics. It seems new to adult debate.
But it isn’t new to our experience. It’s children bickering on the playground, then whining and lying all the way to Teacher. Or even Home.
Responsible adults don’t believe every charge lodged by little boys and little girls.
Like Donny and Hillary.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Sen. Marco Rubio’s charge in last week’s presidential debate, that the mainstream media functions as a SuperPAC for Democrats, was not only accurate, I wrote at Townhall, it has deeper implications.
Consider the relentless media drumbeat for restrictive campaign finance regulations.
If the Federal Elections Commission mutes, at Congress’s instruction, voices of the political parties and silences issue-oriented advocacy groups — or such groups are prevented by the IRS from even forming in the first place — and if Democrats get their way and ban SuperPACs (other than the media), who would hold the loudest megaphone?
You guessed it.
The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, NBC News, etc. — corporate behemoths all — warn of the dangers of big, bad corporations and wealthy individuals, hoping to spur regulation that hamstrings the communications of others.
The regulations somehow never involve abridging the speech of those same powerful media outlets.
Last year, every single Democrat in the Senate voted to repeal the essential constitutional guarantee of free speech, voting for Senate Joint Resolution 19, introduced by Sen. Tom Udall (D‑N.M.).
Had it become part of our Constitution, the First Amendment’s words “Congress shall pass no law” would have been replaced with an open-ended invitation for politicians in Congress to “regulate” campaign spending — therefore speech — to their hearts’ content.
The amendment was so sweeping the authors felt the need to add: “Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the press.”
Big Media is a major force promoting Big Government, always willing to attack advocates of a constitutionally limited government.
Except when it comes to constitutional protections for Big Media.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Why do so many people (especially politicians) favor high tariffs, “managed trade,” embargoes and domestic subsidies, all of which — first as “mercantilism” and then as “protectionism” — have been debunked, repeatedly (demonstrated as ineffective economic policy), since Adam Smith’s famous 1776 attack?
Economist Donald Boudreaux, in an excellent defense of economic principles, explains why the Bernie Sanderses and Donald Trumps of this world support anti-free trade nostrums — out of sheer ignorance:
The typical politician opposes free trade because he … doesn’t understand that the purpose of trade — any trade — is to enrich people as consumers and not to enrich people as producers. He doesn’t understand that exports are a cost and that imports are a benefit; he thinks that it’s the other way ’round. He doesn’t understand that the specific jobs lost to imports are not the only employment consequences of trade; he doesn’t understand that trade also “creates” jobs in the domestic economy.… He, in short, doesn’t understand the first damn thing about the economics of trade.
But what protectionists do understand are direct appeals to “good results” (like more and better high-paying jobs). The fact that their proposals throw a monkey wrench into the diverse mechanisms of trade, yielding worse results?
They just don’t see them.
Why? Because real economies are complex, and protectionists lack the science that would help them trace the consequences of their policies.
The fact that they’ve focused their whole attention on the business of “governing,” and making simplistic, direct appeals to people who are also uneducated in economic principles, doesn’t help.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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