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We are fast approaching Oct. 11. If you have not done so already, you need to insure that you have a comfortable seat readied in front of the television and that you are fully stocked up on popcorn and chips (beer and pizza are optional). This will be a show you do not want to miss.
Paul Ryan, on CBS's Face The Nation yesterday, patiently explained to Norah O’Donnell that Obama's claim to holding out a bi-partisan fig leaf and that the budget impasse has been caused by Republicans does not comport with reality. Ryan really does hold back - were I him, I would have reminded O'Donnell how Obama demagogued the Ryan budget proposal in front of the cameras some months ago. But as Ryan did note, Obama says one thing, but then does another. I think that pretty much sums up Obama in toto.
Nice Deb has much more on this interview, including O'Donnell parroting the latest talking points from the DNC, that Ryan is being hypocritical for opposing defense cuts as part of sequestration when he voted in favor of the bill. Ms. O'Donnell, who clearly understands what Ryan is saying, nonetheless focuses on the talking points like a good little Obama stooge. Do visit Nice Deb for the entire discussion.
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Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC last night was superb - and thus has brought the left out with in shrill and strident response. First, the speech - and if you haven't seen it, do please watch:
Flipping over to Memorandum shows the left's response, all minor variations on a common theme - leading one to ask, is the Journolist still active? At TNR, Jonathan Cohn wrote "The Most Dishonest Convention Speech . . . Ever?" James Downie at Wapo has penned "Paul Ryan's Breathtakingly Dishonest Speech?" while the Wapo editorializes about "Mr. Ryan's Misleading Speech." At Salon, Joan Walsh has written "Paul Ryan's Brazen Lies."
Each one of those articles is a cookie cutter. Let's take a look at what Walsh, for example, claims are lies:
His most brazen lie accused President Obama of “raiding” Medicare by taking the exact same $716 billion that Ryan and the House GOP notoriously voted to slash. It was stunning.
But that’s not all. He attacked Obama for failing to keep open a Janesville GM plant that closed under Bush in 2008. He hit him for a credit-rating downgrade that S&P essentially blamed on GOP intransigence. He claimed that all taxpayers got from the 2009 stimulus was “more debt,” when most got a tax cut (and the stimulus is known to have saved between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs). He derided the president for walking away from the Simpson Bowles commission deficit-cutting recommendations when Ryan himself, a commission member, voted against those recommendations.
He blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.
And of course, he riffed on the tired central lie of the GOP convention: that the president said “government gets the credit” for small businesses, not the business owners themselves.
Other than that, it was a great speech.
Okay, one at a time:
"His most brazen lie accused President Obama of “raiding” Medicare by taking the exact same $716 billion that Ryan and the House GOP notoriously voted to slash."
Obama has raided Medicare for current seniors and applied those funds to pay for Obamacare. Indeed, Obama bragged about it at the time of Obamacare's passage. So, the lie here is what? Yes, Republican's want to cut about a trillion from Medicare - so that our nation remains fiscally solvent, not to fund yet another welfare program. The left utterly refuses to acknowledge the elephant in the room - that Medicare, left unchanged, cannot possibly survive without bankrupting the nation. Moreover, and most importantly, Walsh ignores that Ryan's plan for Medicare doesn't touch current seniors or those close to being able to rely on Medicare.
"He attacked Obama for failing to keep open a Janesville GM plant that closed under Bush in 2008"
Ryan's lie here is apparently that he had the temerity to point out that Obama came to the Janesville GM plant in 2008 and said "I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years." The plant closed and remains closed. Nowhere in his speech does Ryan blame the closing on Obama, but he did use it to highlight the larger issue of Obama's horrendous failure to restart our economy. Indeed, at several points in his speech, Ryan went out of his way to say that Obama did not cause the failed economy - only the failure to recover.
He claimed that all taxpayers got from the 2009 stimulus was “more debt,” when most got a tax cut (and the stimulus is known to have saved between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs).
Ryan talks about the net impact of the Stimulus, and Walsh calls that a lie why? Apparently, Ryan can only address the failed Stimulus if he itemizes each individual line item. And as to those jobs "saved," we are in the worst recovery in our modern history. Does Walsh really want to pretend that Obama's record on jobs is something to be celebrated?
"He derided the president for walking away from the Simpson Bowles commission deficit-cutting recommendations when Ryan himself, a commission member, voted against those recommendations."
And the lie here is? Obama has wholly ignored the Simpson Bowles commission - and he did so in order to avoid having to make any cuts or reforms. Ryan did in fact vote against Simpson Bowles, but did so because "it not only didn’t address the elephant in the room, health care, it made it fatter." To say that Ryan and Obama are both the same on this issue is utterly disingenous.
He blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.
Apparently its not Obama to blame for the $5 trillion increase in debt during his presidency, its Paul Ryan for voting for things that - Walsh neglects to tell us - wholly predated Obama's presidency. Shameless.
"And of course, he riffed on the tired central lie of the GOP convention: that the president said “government gets the credit” for small businesses, not the business owners themselves."
Yes, because we all know that Obama never said that:
Apparently, the word "lie" now means to raise any fact that the left doesn't like. The left, Walsh and seemingly every other leftie in the MSM, is misusing the word no doubt for its impact and to create a narrative demonizing Ryan so they don't have to have the adult arguments. Any time over the past half century, that would have worked. But today, its whistling past the graveyard and, if 2010 is any indication, a majority of the voters know it.
Paul Ryan is under the left's skin.
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Before President Obama called Rep. Paul Ryan's budget "thinly-veiled social Darwinism" last week, I must confess, I had never heard of "social" Darwinism. Jonah Goldberg has stepped into the breech to explain the history of the term. Apparently, it is part of the lexicon used by the left to tar the "robber barons":
. . . Merle Curti in The Growth of American Thought argued that Social Darwinism “admirably suited the needs of the great captains of industry, who were crushing the little fellows when these vainly tried to compete with them.” Henry Steel Commager wrote in The American Mind that “Darwin and Spencer exercised such sovereignty over America as George III had never enjoyed.” And of course Robert Reich has said that Social Darwinism “offered a perfect moral justification for America’s Gilded Age, when robber barons controlled much of American industry, the gap between the rich and poor turned into a chasm, urban slums festered, and politicians were bought off by the wealthy. . . . The modern Conservative Movement has embraced Social Darwinism with no less fervor than it has condemned Darwinism.”
The only problem: None of this is true either. Yes, Andrew Carnegie was a follower of Herbert Spencer and lots of people referenced “natural law” (though rarely as a reference to Darwinian evolution). But for the most part the captains of industry couldn’t care less about this stuff. As Robert Bannister and Irwin Wylie (and more recently Princeton intellectual historian Thomas Leonard) have painstakingly documented, the captains of industry in the 19th century were not particularly influenced by, or even aware of, Darwin and Spencer. This shouldn’t surprise anybody. “Gilded Age businessmen were not sufficiently bookish, or sufficiently well educated, to keep up with the changing world of ideas,” writes Wylie. “As late as 1900, 84 percent of the businessmen listed in Who’s Who in America had not been educated beyond high school.”
Overwhelmingly, businessmen of the period were influenced by Christianity first, classical economics second, self-help inspirational nostrums a distant third, and egghead notions about biology almost not at all. Cornelius Vanderbilt read one book in his entire life. It was Pilgrim’s Progress. And he didn’t get to it until he was past the age of 70. “If I had learned education,” Vanderbilt famously quipped, “I would not have had time to learn anything else.”
Also, it’s worth noting that the so-called red-in-tooth-and-claw Gilded Age was a time of massive, historic economic growth. It was when America overtook Britain as the economic powerhouse of the globe. That’s one reason the left has always hated it. When Europe was boldly embracing socialism, America was proving that capitalism was better at generating wealth and lifting people out of poverty. Moreover, as anybody who’s been in a library, hospital, university, or concert hall bearing the name of Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, et al, can attest, the “Robber Barons” didn’t remotely believe in letting the little guy fend for himself or that wealth was a reflection of either moral superiority or evolutionary “fitness.” Even the one real Spencerist in the bunch, Andrew Carnegie, believed that “the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry—no idol more debasing than the worship of money.” He believed that the man who “dies rich dies disgraced” and himself died one of the most famously generous philanthropists in the world.
One reason the term “Social Darwinism” caught on with progressives was that it served to divert attention from the sins of “reform Darwinism”—i.e., the progressive passion for eugenics. The progressives advocated aggressive statist intervention to improve the genetic stock of the country, while the alleged Social Darwinists championed laissez-faire and private charity and—gasp—reproductive freedom. Moreover, the term Social Darwinism, which in Europe was used to justify nationalist and racist theories of the Hitlerian variety, was the perfect label for playing guilt-by-association in America. Ever since Hofstadter’s book, liberals have used the term to accuse conservatives of desperately wanting to return to a past that never was.
On April 4, Mitt Romney had his turn in front of the newspapermen. “The president came here yesterday and railed against arguments no one is making—and criticized policies no one is proposing. It’s one of his favorite strategies—setting up straw men to distract from his record.”
One suspects that even Romney had no idea how right he was.
And for a bit more clarity, here is the great economist, Milton Friedman, discussing the place of the "robber barons" in our economic history:
I have held off blogging on the President's most recently proposed budget, waiting for Rep. Paul Ryan to do the heavy lifting. And of course he has. This from Rep. Ryan's site:
“President Obama’s irresponsible budget is a recipe for a debt crisis and the decline of America. His refusal to honestly confront our nation’s most pressing challenges does real harm to the economic security of millions of American families. The $1.9 trillion tax increase proposed in his budget will make it harder for businesses to create jobs and for workers to spur economic growth.
This budget does nothing to prevent the bankruptcy of critical programs, threatening the health and retirement security of current and future seniors. Worse, it continues the President’s policy of letting an unaccountable board of bureaucrats cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for seniors. The broken promises and recycled gimmicks contained in this budget have dramatically widened this President’s growing credibility deficit.
Our families, seniors, children and grandchildren deserve better than this reckless budget and this dismal failure of leadership. As Chairman of the House Budget Committee, I will continue to work with my colleagues – from both parties where possible – to advance bold solutions that lift our crushing burden of debt and ensure a future of opportunity, growth and prosperity.”
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Key facts from the President’s budget:
Spends Too Much:
- $47 trillion of government spending over the next decade
- Proposes a net increase over current spending projections
Taxes Too Much:
- $1.9 trillion in new taxes
- Raises taxes, not to pay down the debt, but to fuel more government spending
Borrows Too Much:
- Four straight years of trillion-dollar-plus deficits; no plan to reduce the debt
- Gross debt at the end of FY22: $25.9 trillion
Budget Gimmicks & Broken Promises
- Overstates new deficit reduction by taking credit for savings already enacted
- Exploits discredited budget gimmick by “not spending” nearly $1 trillion that was never going to be spent
And the following is Rep. Ryan's opening statement today, courtesy of Powerline, during the House Budget Committee hearing on the President's FY 2013 budget:
Welcome all, to this important hearing.
I’d like to thank our witness today, Mr. Zients, for coming to us under difficult circumstances.
With the departure of Mr. Lew from OMB just last month, we understand that you are testifying on short notice, and we recognize the difficulty of that.
And unfortunately, your job is even more difficult than usual – you are in the position of having to defend a budget that essentially dodges the most difficult challenges our country faces.
The New York Times has reported that this budget is, quote, “more a platform for the president’s re-election campaign than a legislative proposal.” After a careful review, it’s hard to disagree.
The Associated Press has reported – accurately in my view – that this budget, quote, “[takes] a pass on reining in government growth.”
Instead, it leaves the drivers of our debt – namely, the unsustainable growth of entitlement spending – quote, “largely unchecked.” It takes a pass on real reform, even though the looming bankruptcy of these programs threatens to end the guarantee of security they provide for our nation’s seniors.
And it breaks the President’s promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term. As ABC News reported, this budget “does not come close.” We’ve heard a lot of excuses from this administration for why the President broke his promise. But what we haven’t heard is any semblance of accountability. To the best of my knowledge, no one in the White House has taken responsibility for this failure. Instead, we’ve gotten a blame game that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Jack Lew, your former boss, claimed that the reason Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget in over 1,000 days is that the Republicans have threatened to filibuster. This is simply false. As Mr. Lew surely knows, budget resolutions cannot be filibustered. They can be passed with a simple majority.
The real source of dysfunction in the Senate comes from members of the President’s own party, who have been unwilling – for almost three years now – to go on record in support of his budgets, or to pass budgets of their own. More to the point, it wasn’t so long ago that the President’s party held total control of the White House and both branches of Congress – during which time his agenda was enacted in near totality:
* massive new spending and taxes
* the creation of new, open-ended entitlements
* a regulatory onslaught that hurt the economy
* and trillions of dollars in new debt.
Even after all this, the new House Majority provided him with an opportunity to make good on his promise – to put aside the “chronic avoidance of tough decisions” that he once lamented. We were – and we remain – eager to work with the President to stop spending money we don’t have… to reform government programs that aren’t delivering on their promises… and to enact pro-growth policies that raise revenue by getting our economy moving again.
Yet, instead of working with us, the President has demonized our ideas to save and strengthen health and retirement security programs. He fought to keep his reckless spending spree going. And he continues to insist on taking more money from hardworking Americans – not to reduce the debt, but to fuel his ever-higher spending.
The President’s ongoing refusal to advance serious solutions to our nation’s fiscal challenges represents a stunning dereliction of duty. But I haven’t given up hope. I remain committed to working with my colleagues of both parties wherever common ground can be reached. There is a growing bipartisan consensus for the reforms that are needed. But this consensus cannot succeed as long as the President of the United States remains on the outside looking in.
Unfortunately, that’s where he stands today. And my hope is that this hearing can shed some light on why. Mr. Zients, we look forward to your testimony, but we do not envy your predicament. This unserious budget raises some very serious questions, and the American people deserve answers.
Unfortunately, while Paul Ryan can pontificate with complete accuracy that this budget is a disaster in as much as what it is supposed to be - a serious, governing document, that is not what Obama meant it to be. It should have been stamped Obama Reelection Campaign, 2013. God help us.
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This ad really sums up everything about the left's style of argument. One, it is a complete lie as, under Ryan's plan, senior's Medicare would remain untouched. Two, it is designed to appeal wholly to emotion rather than make any sort of intellectually honest argument. Three, it is designed to demonize the right for making any sort of serous effort to reform Medicare. When the left calls for an adult conversation, what they are really asking is that the right shut up and not push back against their scurrilous attacks. They could care less about anything other than gaining political power, whatever the cost to our nation. Worthless scum.
Looking at the Republican potential / declared candidates for President in 2012, here is how I see their chances:
3 to 1 - Paul Ryan: The economy is the single most important issue facing our nation going into 2012. Ryan understands the economics of our government the way few do - and he can explain the economics, albeit a bit woodenly. Most importantly, he has had the intellectual honesty and huevos grande to go where few politicians dare tread, proposing specific reforms to our entitlement boondoggles. Negatives - he says he won't run.
Ability to beat Obama: 54 to 46.
5 to 1 - Chris Christie: His winning wars with the unions and the democratic legislature in NJ have been the stuff of youtube gold. He is articulate and doesn't back down an inch. His ability to communicate is the best of any politician on either side of the aisle.
Negatives - He says he won't run. He wants to keep NJ pensions as defined benefit plans. Lastly, he seems to have RINO tendencies on issues such as gun control, as well as zero understanding of the threat we face from political Islam.
Ability to beat Obama: 53 to 47.
6 to 1 - Mitch Daniels: Daniels too understands economics, having served as Director of OMB. As a two-term Gov. of Indiana, Daniels has taken Indiana from a significant deficit to fiscal sanity. His first day as Gov., Daniels decertified all government employee unions by executive order and did away with the requirement that State employees pay mandatory union dues. In 2008, he passed laws creating a statewide school voucher program and merit pay for teachers. He also oversaw passage of laws penalizing companies who employed illegal aliens as well as denying illegal aliens in-state tuition.
Negatives: His earlier call for a truce on social issues has left SoCon's leery. Moreover, one of his first acts as Gov. was to submit a fiscal plan that called for tax increases. Lastly, he is still playing coy, promising to decide on whether to enter the race "soon."
Ability to beat Obama: 53 to 47.
8 to 1 - Mitt Romney: He is a well known quantity from the 2008 election. He was a very successful businessman and a former governor of bluest of blue Mass. He will likely be able to raise a huge warchest. And lastly, he is the "next man in line," which seems to be the way Republicans choose their nominees.
Negatives: Romneycare, Romneycare, Romneycare. Did I mention Romneycare.
Ability to beat Obama: 51 to 49.
10 - 1 Michelle Bachman: She is still a bit of a mystery to me. She has embraced the tea party and taken strong positions on social issues, leading others more knowledgeable about her than I to say that she has the SoCon vote largely sewn up. I have not heard her debate anyone yet. I do know that she has very strong money raising potential.
Negatives: She has already gotten a bit of the Sarah Palin treatment from the media, claiming that she is an intellectual light weight. If she does well in debates, she could easily move up the ladder.
Ability to beat Obama: 50 to 50.
10 - 1 Herman Cain: An extremely successful businessman and an arch-conservative talk show host. He is likable, well spoken and has the best business bona fides of anyone in the race. He is able to think quickly on his feet and is very knowledgeable about all of the major political issues.
Negatives: No experience in government. His health is also a concern.
Ability to beat Obama: 50 to 50.
15 - 1 - Sarah Palin: She is the most well known of all the potential candidates. She is intelligent, articulate and beautiful. But having been the subject of the most relentless leftwing media jihad in our nations history, she is a wild card. If she enters the race, and she might, I could easily see her placing second, if not first.
Negatives - She has already been successfully labled by the left as an intellectual lightweight. She would have to overcome that label and overcome questions regarding her decision to resign from the governorship of Alaska.
Ability to beat Obama: 49 to 51.
15 - 1 - Jeb Bush: He is the Bush that his family thought would be President. By all accounts, he did an excellent job as Gov. of Florida, making positive changes in the areas of education, medical malpractice and Medicare.
Negatives: He has indicated that he will likely not run. And of course, his last name is Bush - a liability for probably the next 4 to 6 years.
Ability to beat Obama: 49 to 51.
100 - 1 - Jon Huntsman: One of the key issues facing us is the left's insane push to treat carbon as a pollutant, with all the ramifications that has for our economy. A few days ago, Huntsman said he believes in man-made global warming. Moreover, while he was Gov. of Utah, he embraced the stimulus.
Negatives: I don't see much positive about Huntsman at this point.
Ability to beat Obama: 47 to 53.
999 to 1 - Ron Paul: From an uber-isolationist foreign policy to his embrace of the gold standard, Ron Paul is the Republican's crazy uncle.
Ability to beat Obama: 30 to 70.
1,000,000 to 1 - Chuck Schumer: I list Schumer simply to put the chances of Newt Gingrich in perspective.
Ability to beat Obama: 0.
1,000,001 to 1 - Newt Gingrich: Having gone on the Sunday talk shows and played Russian roulette with all chambers filled, Gingrich has destroyed any possible chance of winning the nomination for Republican candidate for the Presidency. But all is not lost. He could still mount a primary challenge to Obama.
Ability to beat Obama: 0
In 2010, when I pondered Newt Gingrich entering the 2012 Presidential race, I was optimistic indeed. A brilliant history professor with tremendous intellectual agility, Newt was a man, I thought, who could take up the conservative banner and run with it. After all, he had led the great Republican revolution in 1994 and he championed the Contract With America, a Reagenesque basket of specific reforms strongly supported by all conservatives.
Then, earlier this year, Newt came out in full support of ethanol subsidies. As I wrote here:
Bio-fuels are the world's greatest boondoggle. The fuel is inefficient, expensive and actually contributes to the growth of CO2 in our atmosphere. Not only does it make no sense to mandate or subsidize ethanol, it is a major contributing factor to poverty and hunger world-wide. . . .
And indeed, the WSJ crucified Gingrich for this horrid bit of Iowa-centric, anti-conservative politics, labeling him "Professor Cornpone." The WSJ opined that Gingrich's "ethanol lobbying raises larger questions about his convictions and judgment." To say the least.
And yesterday, appearing on "Meet the Press," Gringrich came out in opposition to Paul Ryan's proposed fix for Medicare, calling it a plan for "radical change" and describing it as "right wing social engineering." To top that fatal self-inflicted wound, he announced support for some "variant" of the "individual mandate." The "individual mandate" means a vast expansion in government power beyond anything envisioned by the Founders, no matter how you cut it. As Judge Roger Vinson noted, as regards the "individual mandate:"
It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place. If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be ““difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power" . . . and we would have a Constitution in name only. Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended.
You know, if I wanted to vote for a big government politician who embraces harmful programs for their political value and who wants to vastly expand government power over the individual irrespective of the Constitution, I would vote straight Democrat. Newt doesn't need to be making a bid for the Republican candidacy for President, he needs to be mounting a primary challenge against Obama. At any rate, he won't be getting my vote, much less my support.
Update: Charles Krauthammer delivers the eulogy over Gingrich's 2012 election chances.
Obama is finally figuring out that the November 2010 elections meant something. Americans can see the direction of our country - and its running fast and furious towards an economic cliff. Obama tried ignoring it with his 2011 Budget and insane SOTU speech. In stark contrast, Rep. Paul Ryan recently released a budget proposal to deal honestly with our problems. Obama tried to respond today - with a speech of course, not a serious budget proposal. Here is the summary of that speech:
The debt and deficit is Bush's fault. Republican's budget plan is "E"-vil. It will destroy our nation's infrastructure, toss grandmothers into the street, take away their health care, and take candy from babies. WE (the royal "we") will bring fiscal sanity to America by gutting our military and raising taxes on the rich and corporations. WE will also increase spending and leave untouched all benefits for social security and medicare. All of this will magically reduce the deficit by trillions.
Add a ton of intellectually dishonest demagoguery and announce a new panel with Joe the Clown in charge and that is it a nutshell. Obama is more dangerously incompetent than Homer Simpson working at a nuke plant.
Update: Krauthammer offers his take on the scurrilous performance by Obama:
Jake Tapper at Political Punch notes this contrast in intellectual honesty from one of Obama's prior speeches to today's:
President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:
“We're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”
President Obama today:
“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”
One word that will never be appended to Obama when history is written is "leadership." My only question is whether we will still be able to fix our country post 2012, or whether Obama and the left have set us on a permanent progressive course to ruin.
Update from Rep. Paul Ryan, via the Weekly Standard:
“When the President reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch. Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.
“Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the President created a Fiscal Commission. He then ignored its recommendations and omitted any of its major proposals from his budget, and now he wants to delegate leadership to yet another commission to solve a problem he refuses to confront.
“We need leadership, not a doubling down on the politics of the past. By failing to seriously confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history, this President’s policies are committing our children to a diminished future. We are looking for bipartisan solutions, not partisan rhetoric. When the President is ready to get serious about confronting this challenge, we'll be here.”Update: Ryan's office highlights "key facts" from Obama's speech:
· Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.
· Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.
· Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
Update: The full comments from Paul Ryan on video -
(H/T Hot Air)
On his first day as Speaker of the House, John Boehner received a letter from the CBO stating that "repealing health care reform will add $230 billion to the deficit over the next decade, leave 32 million fewer people with insurance and lead to higher costs for those who are covered." That was both a smart tactical ploy by the left and an utterly contemptible falsehood. Suppose someone - say, the president of United States - proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I've got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion. (H/T Prarie Pundit)
Responding to the left's disingenuous arguments, Charles Krauthammer weighs in today, explaining in a few short paragraphs the massive fraud of Obamacare:
He'd be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare. During the debate over Republican attempts to repeal it, one of the Democrats' major talking points has been that Obamacare reduces the deficit - and therefore repeal raises it - by $230 billion. Why, the Congressional Budget Office says exactly that.
Very true. And very convincing. Until you realize where that number comes from. Explains CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in his "preliminary analysis of H.R. 2" (the Republican health-care repeal): "CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion."
As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin pointed out when mining this remarkable nugget, this is a hell of a way to do deficit reduction: a radical increase in spending, topped by an even more radical increase in taxes.
Of course, the very numbers that yield this $230 billion "deficit reduction" are phony to begin with. The CBO is required to accept every assumption, promise (of future spending cuts, for example) and chronological gimmick that Congress gives it. All the CBO then does is perform the calculation and spit out the result.
In fact, the whole Obamacare bill was gamed to produce a favorable CBO number. Most glaringly, the entitlement it creates - government-subsidized health insurance for 32 million Americans - doesn't kick in until 2014. That was deliberately designed so any projection for this decade would cover only six years of expenditures - while that same 10-year projection would capture 10 years of revenue. With 10 years of money inflow vs. six years of outflow, the result is a positive - i.e., deficit-reducing - number. Surprise.
If you think that's audacious, consider this: Obamacare does not create just one new entitlement (health insurance for everyone); it actually creates a second - long-term care insurance. With an aging population, and with long-term care becoming extraordinarily expensive, this promises to be the biggest budget buster in the history of the welfare state.
And yet, in the CBO calculation, this new entitlement to long-term care reduces the deficit over the next 10 years. By $70 billion, no less. How is this possible? By collecting premiums now, and paying out no benefits for the first 10 years. Presto: a (temporary) surplus. As former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and scholars Joseph Antos and James Capretta note, "Only in Washington could the creation of a reckless entitlement program be used as 'offset' to grease the way for another entitlement." I would note additionally that only in Washington could such a neat little swindle be titled the "CLASS Act" (for the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act).
That a health-care reform law of such enormous size and consequence, revolutionizing one-sixth of the U.S. economy, could be sold on such flimflammery is astonishing, even by Washington standards. . . .
And here was Paul Ryan making the same points on the House floor the other day, prior to the vote to repeal Obamacare:
(H/T Nice Deb)
At the WSJ several days ago, a former CBO Director and two former CBO Assistant Directors explained in some detail how and why the CBO came op with the numbers it did. The short version, false numbers in, false numbers out.
The left is now in an all-out push to protect Obamacare, willing to use the most ridiculous and scurrilous of lies to shape public opinion.
Rep. Steve Cohen equates Republicans with Nazis for their "lies" in support of repealing Obamacare. He gives no specifics, but then again, no specifics are required for left wing argument, just demonization.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee tells us that repealing Obamacare will "kill" people, and in particular, directs her arguments towards seniors, all of whom are actually covered by Medicare, the program raped to provide funding for Obamacare.
(/sarcasm on) Noted Constitutional scholars (/sarcasm off) Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Rep. John Lewis, between only a few working brain cells, tell us that to repeal Obamacare would be unconstitutional.
The left, in passing the nightmare for our country that is Obamacare, made the wildly ridiculous argument that Obamacare would create jobs. Well, the massive regulations will create more government jobs, but the regulations themselves would inevitably cost exponentially far more jobs in the private sector as the costs of compliance take hold. Apparently some on the left don't quite understand economics or much about the private sector, so when Eugene Robinson, appearing on MSNBC, called on Obama to now defend Obamacare by explaining to America how it would be a boon to employment, Rachel Maddow quickly switched him off that line of argument.
At any rate, expect to be inundated with emotion-heavy, fact-lite arguments from the left on Obamacare for the next two years. The single most important thing that Republicans can do is call the CBO Director in for hearings, have him explain both how the books are cooked on Obamacare and how the numbers change when the smoke and mirrors are removed. Then at the end of the hearing, the Republicans need to package it into a neat little sound bite summary, appropriate for use in one or two minute ads ripping the left for being dishonest and wildly reckless with Obamacare and our economy.
Over the past few weeks, I have been harping on the fact that the traditional national paradigm has disappeared. Americans recognize that we are on an unsustainable path and that the bill for decades of free lunches is now due. Americans only require some national leadership. The days when Democrats could demagouge entitlements are over. We see it in NJ with Chris Christie. Paul Ryan is trying to do the same thing at the national level. The problem is that our Congressional Republicans don't get it and are still too craven to act. Dick Armey articulated that thought on Meet The Press yesterday:
In an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" over the weekend, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey issued a warning that Republicans risk being targeted by the Tea Party if they don't get with the program when it comes to signing onto fiscally conservative policy. . . .
"The difference between being on -- a co-sponsor with Ryan and not is a thing called courage," explained the prominent conservative voice. "So we're saying to the Republican Party , you know, 'Get some courage to stand up for the things that are right for this country. Don't stand there and, and, and hide from the issue because you're afraid of the politics.'"
Armey went to underscore his bottom line: "The issue of public policy that governs the future of my children is more important than your politics, and if you can't see that, we'll replace you." . . .
The latest "intelligent, rational and effective idea" from the Agenda Project to advance public debate?The Agenda Project’s goal is to build a powerful, intelligent, well-connected political movement capable of identifying and advancing rational, effective ideas in the public debate and in so doing ensure our country’s enduring success.
Mission Statement of the liberal Agenda Project
(H/T Another Black Conservative). Isn't that pithy. They must be ivy league grads.
This is part for the course for our modern left. Demonizing and dismissing out of hand the arguments of their opponents is their only strategy. The Tea Party challenges Obama's profligate spending and vast new statist programs - the left plays the race card. State that Obamacare's mandate is a tax, utterly ridiculous says Obama. Raise ethics charges against Maxine Waters, it's racism. Challenge the building of the Ground Zero mosque - religious bigotry, says Mayor Bloomberg. Paul Ryan's ideas to bring us back to fiscal sanity - flim flam says Paul Krugman. Indeed, as to the last example, WSJ recently ran an article on how Krugman is merely one of many on the far left who would like to see Paul Ryan disappear without having to address the substance of his arguments.
We have seen this same meme played out hundreds of thousands of times over the past decades. Indeed, the same Democrats who created the massive housing bubble and who destroyed our credit system in the process did so on the grounds that any challenge thereto was racist.
And now with November fast approaching, it's down to the left's final argument, f*** tea. These people are as intellectualy dishonest as they are intellectualy bankrupt.
I am not surprised that Paul Krugman, in his most recent column, has demonized Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan as a "fraud" and a "flim flam man." Demonizing one's ideological opponents rather than engaging in reasoned debates is, after all, central to how the left operates. And there are few further to the left than Krugman, a "Nobel prize winning economist" who has made a career at the NYT acting as a shill for the far left. And indeed, Krugman has been one of the foremost champions of the Obama administration's economic policies that today have us mired in the worst recession since World War II.
Rep. Paul Ryan is rapidly becoming recognized as the intellectual leader of House Republicans. Months ago, Ryan drafted a "Roadmap For America's Future." It is a detailed and comprehensive economic plan that addresses deficits, taxes, and entitlements. It is a very serious plan aimed at putting America back on a robust economic footing. And it is a plan that has been getting a lot of positive press as Obama's Keynesian solutions to our severe economic distress only have us heading further into the swamp.
Krugman starts off his diatribe with a statement that, coming from him, is the height of irony:
One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans.
If anyone could attest to the truth of that statement, its Paul Krugman.
At any rate, Krugman relies heavily on information from the Tax Policy Center, a left leaning organization that, Krugman claims, has determined that Ryan's plan is based on faulty assumptions and is, therefore, unworkable. Krugman then goes on to rake Ryan over the coals." Krugman claims that, in reality, Ryan's road map would cut taxes for the rich (ahhh, there's that class warfare again), slash entitlements generally, and destroy Medicare.
This has to be one of the sloppiest hack jobs ever written.
Krugman charges Ryan with fraud in part because Ryan did not have the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) score the revenue side of his plan. Krugman apparently doesn't know that that job is not within CBO's purview, but rather has to be done by a different organization - the JCT (Joint Committee on Taxation). The JCT is responsible for providing the official revenue score of tax legislation - and they did it for the Roadmap.
But perhaps most damning of Krugman's hackery is the fact that the members of the Tax Policy Center were so disturbed by Krugman's distortion of what they had written that they felt it necessary to post on their website a detailed defense of Rep. Ryan and a refutation of Krugman's ridiculous charges of "fraud:"
In Defense of Congressman Paul Ryan
Given that columnist Paul Krugman relied on Tax Policy Center estimates to level claims that Congressman Paul Ryan is a “flimflam man” and that Ryan’s plan to address our fiscal problems is a “fraud,” I think a defense of the Congressman is in order. . . .
You can read the entire defense here.
Similarly, Meagan McArdle at the Atlantic, no right winger herself, also rises with a defense of Ryan. And then, of course, Rep. Ryan himself has responded to Krugman:
Despite watching European welfare states collapse under the weight of their own debt, those running Washington are leading us down precisely the same path. With the debt surpassing $13 trillion, we can no longer avoid having a serious discussion about how to address the unsustainable growth of government.
Unfortunately, rather than make meaningful contributions to this conversation and bring solutions to the table, Democrats have attempted to win this debate by default. Relying on demagoguery and distortion, the left would prefer that entitlements - often labeled the "third rail" of American politics - remain untouchable, and the column by Paul Krugman of The New York Times is indicative of the partisan attacks leveled against the plan I've offered, a "Roadmap for America's Future." . . .
You can find Ryan's lengthy response to Krugman here.
As an addendum, let me ask, what is it about left wing economists? There has yet to be a centrally controlled economy that can compete with a capitalist economy (and a less regulated one the better.) There has yet to be an instance of which I am aware where Keynesian economics has actually worked as hypothesized. Indeed, just ask Obama's now retiring Chairman of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer. Every time for the last century, when we have cut tax rates, our economy has expanded to the point where government revenues increased. Yet the left, pointing to Krugman and his ilk, have a death grip on their Keynesian beliefs, their desire to use tax policy to punish our most productive citizens, and to use government to redistribute wealth. I can only conclude that Krugman is as worthy of his Nobel prize in economics as Robert Merton and Myron Scholes were. They are the two Nobel prize winning economists who started a hedge fund that failed after losing $4.6 billion in less than four months in 1998. I suspect, before all is said and done, Krugman will join them in ignominy.
The next few months will be critical to choosing our economic path. We are staring into the face of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and a Budget Commission's report likely to include calls for massive new taxes. Moreover, we may well see Republicans regain the House if not the Senate. If so, are they brave enough to actually address America's economic problems?
One unique characteristic of America has long been optimism about the future - that things will inevitably get better, not just for our generation, but for our children. No more. We now expect that our children and grandchildren will experience a lower standard of living. According to a Fox News poll, over 62% of Americans today think America is in decline and most see America as in the middle of transitioning from capitalism to socialism.
Americans have good reason to be pessimistic at the moment. As the WSJ explains:
Americans say they are underwhelmed by the economic recovery, and yesterday's report of 2.4% growth in the second quarter met their expectations. A recovery that should be accelerating after the long and deep recession has instead downshifted into slower growth. . . .
The irony is that businesses and consumers have been fixing their balance sheets even as the government has been doing the opposite. States and localities have deficits of nearly $100 billion, while the federal hole will be close to $1.4 trillion for the second year in a row.
This implies higher taxes, which Democrats in Washington are promising to deliver on January 1, and that's only the first installment. So just as Americans are putting themselves in the financial condition to start investing and spending more robustly, the Obama Administration will suck tens of billions out of the private economy. This is not the way to nurture a recovery that is weaker than it should be. . . .
A robust recovery would be building momentum, especially with historically easy monetary policy continuing. Instead this one is plodding along . . .
The epic government stimulus has failed to produce the robust expansion the White House promised, and the prospect of higher taxes and more regulation is inhibiting the private animal spirits needed for growth to accelerate. Americans may have to wait for November for Washington to get that message.
Obama and the left, having multiplied our national debt by a factor of nine since taking control of our national purse strings in 2007, show no inclination to limit spending. Indeed, having wasted a significant portion of the $787 billion dollar stimulus propping up profligate states and their public union workers, the left is now busy trying to funnel yet more of our tax money to states as the stimulus funds run dry.
On the back of such massive wasteful spending, these same people have been busy passing far reaching legislation that will make it more difficult for businesses to profit and for markets to function. In the rush to enact Obama's sweeping agenda, few if any paused to read, let alone consider, the fine print.
For but one example, Obama's new financial regulations stripped legal protections from bond rating agencies, subjecting them to liability for their expert opinions. As soon as the law went into effect last week, rating agencies told their clients that they could no longer use their bond ratings in bond-registration statements. Such statements are required by law for the issuance of bonds offered for public investment. This will drive the issuance of virtually all new bonds into the private market. At a minimum, this will slow the pace of issuance of municipal bonds and eventually drive the costs of borrowing higher, perhaps significantly so. As an aside, I am not suggesting for a moment that bond rating agencies should be exempt from responsibility for their ratings. It was a major contributing cause to our financial meltdown. But this law was not the way to do it. Indeed, this law would not have been crafted any differently if its main purpose was to bring havoc to our bond markets.
Yet another prime example was the Obamacare provision that small businesses have been screaming about - the one that will require all businesses to file tax forms for every vendor that sells them more than $600 in goods. This will entail a massive expansion of paperwork for both businesses and the IRS and it will prove a very significant burden on small businesses. Even Democrats now understand that what they passed is a time bomb for our economy. Yet having passed the bill, they are refusing to repeal it unless Republicans agree to allow the Dems to borrow the $19 billion the provision was supposed to add to government coffers over the next decade. Republicans are demanding that the $19 billion be paid for from existing funds as required by the Pay As You Go legislation Obama signed into law several months ago. (The Democrats passage of pay go legislation is proving to be, as I opined at the time, perhaps the most cynical act to come out of our government in decades - and that is saying a lot.)
As I documented here, small business are not hiring or otherwise expanding, waiting to see what new liabilities they will face from a Democratic administration that seems determined to punish our economy. Large business are doing the same. As the editors of IBD recently opined:
How do you keep an economy from digging itself out of a major recession? One surefire method is massively expanding a government whose major programs are already on their way to bankruptcy, then sitting idly by as major tax increases arrive.
The Democratic Congress has spent a trillion dollars on a failed Keynesian stimulus that promised millions of jobs that never materialized. They added a massive new entitlement in the form of a government takeover of health care when the entitlements already burdening us are going broke. And they are letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year.
Why in such a chancy economic environment would investors invest? Why would entrepreneurs take risks? And why would businesses expand and hire new employees? By extension, why would consumers spend?. . .
The answers to those questions seem obvious, but they apparently are a mystery to the left and their water carriers, particularly those at the NYT. For perhaps the most sophomoric commentary written by anyone on this topic - or any other topic, for that matter - do see NYT Columnist Bob Herbert's recent column, A Sin and a Shame. In it, he demonizes the profit motive and tells us that corporations should be required to maximize jobs as a public benefit rather than maximizing profits on behalf of the corporation's owners and investors. Of course, he is being paid by the NYT, a paper that recently ran an editorial advising us that deficits do not matter while coming out in favor of ever more public spending supported by a combination of massive new taxes and cuts in an already dangerously low defense budget.
Like Marx before him, class warfare is the major animating factor of Obama. His entire Presidency has been predicated on demonizing and squeezing businesses and the "rich," a group which for Obama includes people pulling in $250,000 a year. That's not quite Jed Clampett territory, but be that as it may, the truth of our still partially capitalist economy is that the "rich" are the ones who invest in businesses, who fund start ups, and who spend their money. As the AP recently reported:
Economists say overall consumer spending has slowed mainly because the richest 5 percent of Americans -- those earning at least $207,000 -- are buying less. They account for about 14 percent of total spending. These shoppers have retrenched as their investment values have sunk and home values have languished.
In addition, the most sweeping tax cuts in a generation are due to expire in January, . . . The wealthy may be keeping some money on the sidelines due to uncertainty over whether or not they will soon face higher taxes.
Jee, do you think?
Rich people have both the time and inclination to minimize their tax burden. Exhibit one, Sen. John Kerry (D - Mass.) who recently parked his new $7 million yacht in Rhode Island to get around about half a million in Massachusetts state taxes. The truth is that Kerry is doing nothing that virtually all Americans do - minimize their tax burden.
The collary to that is that increasing the tax burden on high earners almost inevitably leads to a reduction in tax receipts and less economic growth, while limiting the burden has, for the past century, led to increasing tax receipts as the total of America's wealth expanded. Economist Art Laffer expanded upon this in the WSJ recently:
. . . [T]here is a false presumption that higher tax rates on the top 1% of income earners will raise tax revenues.
Anyone who is familiar with the historical data available from the IRS knows full well that raising income tax rates on the top 1% of income earners will most likely reduce the direct tax receipts from the now higher taxed income—even without considering the secondary tax revenue effects, all of which will be negative. And who on Earth wants higher tax rates on anyone if it means larger deficits? . . .
We all know that there are lots of factors influencing tax revenues from the rich, but the number one factor has to be the statutory tax rates government tells the rich they have to pay. Not only do the direct income tax consequences of higher tax rates on those in the highest brackets lead to higher deficits, the indirect effects magnify the tax revenue losses many fold.
As a result of higher tax rates on those people in the highest tax brackets, there will be less employment, output, sales, profits and capital gains—all leading to lower payrolls and lower total tax receipts. There will also be higher unemployment, poverty and lower incomes, all of which require more government spending. It's a Catch-22.
Higher tax rates on the rich create the very poverty and unemployment that is used to justify their presence. It is a vicious cycle that well-trained economists should know to avoid.
We will be reaching a real tipping point in the next few months. We will either begin taking the steps necessary to bring our national budget into long term health and creating an atmosphere in which businesses can expand, or we will be dooming our country to long term economic pain, if not catastrophe. I would like to be able to say that this is a choice between the plans of Obama and the plans of Republicans, but that does not seem to be the reality.
Republicans are licking their chops at major gains in November on a platform of simply not being Democrats. Admittedly, that is a major step forward, but it is not a solution to the long term economic problems that we face. Only one Republican, Rep. Paul Ryan, has articulated a real plan to address our severe national economic problems. It is his road map. It is a serious plan, but not one without pain.
Instead of embracing the plan, Republicans have shied away from it, apparently seeking to sell the same snake oil to America that Democrats are selling - that our problems can be fixed without pain and that the money tree is still growing an endless supply of dollars. This from the Washington Post:
. . . Ryan is running a campaign of a different sort, one his party has so far refused to adopt: He is determined to persuade colleagues to get serious about eliminating the national debt, even if it means openly broaching overhauls of Medicare and Social Security.
He speaks in apocalyptic terms, saying the debt is "completely unsustainable" and warning that "it will crash our economy." He urges fellow politicians, and voters, to stop pretending that this problem will go away on its own.
He administers his sermons with evangelical zeal. He will go anywhere and talk to anyone who will listen. When he is not writing op-eds and appearing on television, he can often be found speaking to liberal and conservative audiences alike about his "Roadmap for America's Future," a plan he says would fix the problem.
"Political people always tell their candidates to stay away from controversy," said Ryan, 40. "They say, 'Don't propose anything new or bold because the other side will use it against you.' "
While he does not name the "political people," they no doubt include many Republican colleagues, who, even as they praise Ryan for his doggedness, privately consider the Roadmap a path to electoral disaster. Unlike most politicians of either party, he doesn't speak generically about reducing spending, but he does acknowledge the very real cuts in popular programs that will be required to bring down the debt.
His ideas are provocative, to say the least. They include putting Medicare and Medicaid recipients in private insurance plans that could cost the government less but potentially offer fewer benefits; gradually raising the retirement age to 70; and reducing future Social Security benefits for wealthy retirees.
Of the 178 Republicans in the House, 13 have signed on with Ryan as co-sponsors.
Ryan's proposals have created a bind for GOP leaders, who spent much of last year attacking the Democrats' health-care legislation for its measures to trim Medicare costs. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has alternately praised Ryan and emphasized that his ideas are not those of the party. . . .
What seems clear is that far too much of our Republican political class is out of touch with America today. Ask anyone in the Tea Party movement if they are ready to take the medicine necessary to put America back on an upward trajectory and I think the answer will be uniformly yes. The days when talk of reforming Social Security and Medicare were a recipe for disaster at the hands of demagoging Democrats are years in the past. Yet far too many of our Congressional Republicans still don't get it.
My greatest fear is not that Democrats will retain power of the purse strings come November, but that Republicans will win it - and then do nothing constructive. If so, then we as a nation are in deep trouble indeed.
Paul Ryan impresses me every time I hear him.
He appeared on Hardball to discuss the Bush Tax Cuts and plans to put our economy back on a fiscally sane path. Matthews did a hyper-aggressive interview with Ryan and Ryan shined.
Rep. Joe Crowley of NY also appeared on the show - and was about as far out of his element as he could be. His answer to our economic milaise was to tout the Democrats Pay-Go legislation. The problem of course is the left has that new law encased under glass, only to be brought out to wave around on camera before the mid-terms. Matthews didn't push Crowley at all, but its just as well as that gave more time for Ryan.
Do enjoy this one:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
As I wrote in a companion post below:
At a time when the left has swung the pendulum hard to the left in both the UK and the US, at a time when the electorate of both US and UK appears poised for a massive move to the right, the "conservative" parties - the Tories in the UK, the Republicans in the U.S. - seem far from up to the task. When we need Churchill and Reagan, we instead have leaders in the mold of Clement Attlee and Herbert Hoover. The problem is particularly acute in the UK.
In the post below, I address the problems of the UK and its "conservative party." By comparison, our problems in the U.S. are not as dire as those of Britain's, largely because our democracy is much more representative than is their's. Yet in some ways, our problems are not dissimilar. In both countries, the left has pushed our nation's so far to the left that the economies and the very fabric of our societies are threatened. Further, today, neither in the UK nor in the U.S. is there a sufficiently strong leader on the right to stem the tide. For the UK, four weeks from their next election, that fact is disastrous. For we in the U.S., it is not yet at that point given that we are about two years out from having to decide who will be the Republican nominee. Yet the problems that they will face will be every bit as daunting as those faced in the UK:
- Between massive deficit spending and out of control entitlement programs, our economy is approaching a potentially existential crisis:
The U.S. government has $12.5 trillion of funded debt, almost 90% of last year’s GDP. That is a critical level according to Reinhart and Rogoff based on their 800-year study of sovereign bankruptcies. Serious, funded debt is not the major problem. Unfunded entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) are. These are estimated to be $106 trillion.
And still Obama continues a world record spending spree.
- the left wars on business (non-union businesses, at least) and the profit motive. Given the Obama plan to let many of the Bush era tax cuts expire and given the murmurings about a VAT tax, it appears that Obama's next grand act will be an attempt to tax us into prosperity.
- the war on business has resulted in persistent and staggering unemployment in America. "The U-6 unemployment number . . . is at 17.5%, within 0.5% of its all-time high. This figure includes discouraged workers who've stopped looking, marginally attached workers, and workers that are forced to work part-time because full-time jobs are not available."
- the enactment of Obamacare portends to only worsen our fiscal crisis while doing nothing to alleviate the severe crises posed by are already existing entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare, Medicade and S-CHIP to name but a few.
- Public sector unions, only allowed in America since the days of JFK, are a toxin in America. They have perverse incentives to push for bigger government and higher taxes and they operate unchecked by market forces. They degrade performance in every aspect of the government where they exist and are a particular problem in education. The average public sector union worker now makes significantly more than their private sector counterparts - and they are destroying state and local economies with massive unfunded pension liabilities.
- Regulatory burdens, particularly in the area of environmentalism where the left has handed the keys to the courthouse to the radical greens, with untold costs to our economy. Moreover, in a move that bypasses Congressional refusal to enact cap and trade, the EPA recently announced that they will begin regulating carbon - in what portends to be a significant cost to our economy.
- Proposed regulatory changes to our financial structure that will place significantly greater racially charged lending standards on our financial institutions, despite the fact that this same degradation of lending standards led in large part to our current financial meltdown.
- The removing of any caps on the liability that will be underwritten by the U.S. government from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
- The left continues to feed the race baiting industry beyond long after we passed any rational justification. It is time to bring an end to affirmative action as well as any and all use of the disparate impact theory to punish entities for racism despite no evidence of any act of racism. It should be noted that Obama wants to expand the disparate impact theory as part of the new financial regulations.
- our Courts are regularly legislating from the bench, reinterpreting Constitutional provisions in a manner far outside of the original intent of the drafters to bypass the ballot box on contentious social issues, ripping at the fabric of our nation. We could really use a Constitutional Amendment on this issue to provide some guidance to the Courts on how to execute their Article III duties.
All of the above are simply domestic problems - and the last two our my own issues that are not as pressing as the rest, but that do need to be addressed as part of a radical reorientation of our domestic polity. None of this even begins to touch upon the problems Obama and the left are causing in foreign policy.
Whoever is to tackle all of these problems in a decisive manner will have to be highly intelligent, articulate, and sufficiently driven by internalized conservative idealism to withstand the type of massive assault in the left wing MSM that will come with applying conservative solutions to the above problems - many of which will of necessity mean reorienting America away from the left wing path it has been on since at least FDR. Moreover, we are going to need a reorientation that has as its absolute focus the growth of businesses of all size - we are in a hole where the only answer to both our deficit and our undemployment problem is to grow ourselves out of both. Do we have a leader that strong on the horizon to accomplish all of these things?
Perhaps we do. I think New Gingrich fits that bill. I would also watch closely Paul Ryan and Chris Christie. I think all others are a level below these three in intellect, if not also in the intestinal fortitude needed to lead the type of radical reorientation our nation needs to survive, let alone to remain as first among equals.
Newt Gingrich - He is an absolutely brilliant man and a highly articulate speaker. Compliments of the MSM smear machine in the 1990's, many in the left and center have negative views of Gingrich, though it is doubtful those general views are today sufficiently strongly held to disqualify him from making a run. Of all the potential candidates, I would think him most qualified and the most likely to be able to address the many problems of our country itemized above.
Paul Ryan - I do not know enough about him yet to put a gold star next to his name, but his performance during the televised dog and pony shows with Obama have shown him to be articulate and in possession of a first class intellect. It is also notable that he is the only one, of all the Republicans in Congress, to actually publish an alternative to Obamacare. He is one to further evaluate.
Chris Christie - This man impresses ever more on a daily basis. He faces many of the problems in governing New Jersey that our nation faces on a grander scale. He is demonstrating daily a strong intellect and an even more impressive hard as nails approach to the problems of New Jersey. If he succeeds in turning around New Jersey in any cognizant fashion, he will definitely be a person to watch - if not in the 2012 election, then in 2016 and beyond. He has already demonstrated the combativeness and cajones necessary to push through the radical reorientation our country needs and he, unlike George Bush and much of the Republican Party, has also shown a willingness to push back hard against the smears of the left.
Then there are the lessers and the long shots:
Sarah Palin - as much as I like her, I don't see her as sufficiently rounded to make a run for the Presidency. I think her decision to give up her governership not even half way through her term was fatal to a bid for 2012. Perhaps in 2016 she might have a chance.
Mitt Romney - His claim to fame was his economic smarts. But the simple fact is that he designed Obamacare for Massachusetts. Either his economic smarts are vastly over-rated or this man is an incredibly cynical political opportunist. Regardless which, we can afford neither in office beyond 2012, and thus I won't be pulling a lever for him under any circumstances.
Mike Huckabee - his foreign policy views were what turned me against him during the last primary and nothing since has occurred since that would lead me to believe that he has gained strength in that area. That said, I do like his Fox shows.
Ron Paul - I would vote for Obama before I would vote for Paul. He really is a few McNuggets short of a Happy Meal.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty - I do not know enough about him at this point to make a decision on Pawlenty. I have heard him speak a few times and have not walked away with either a positive or negative impression. Perhaps that itself says all that needs to be said.
We will see who rises to the top over the next year. The other critical issue will be gaining conservatives in sufficient numbers in Congress. At any point in my lifetime, I would not have thought that possible. But today, given the path to the far left Obama is pushing us and the strength of the Tea Party movement - I now think it very possible.
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942
President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan.
We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from milking the system for billions. And we don’t want to address in any meaningful way the individual’s responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and chronic health procedures.
No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law . . .Victor Davis Hanson, We've Crossed The Rubicon, PJM, 21 March, 2010
On Saturday night, we were a nation in deep trouble. We had a national debt of $12,676,374,186,522.00 - and were hemorrhaging billions in red ink daily. Unemployment/underemployment was well over 16% and was not forecast to get better during the coming year. We were still in the midst of the worst recession in our nation since the Great Depression - a recession itself brought on by Democrat social engineering of lending standards and a massive market distortion caused by Fannie and Freddie. (Update: The WSJ reports today that personal incomes contracted in the past year) Social Security, run as a ponzi scheme by a rapacious Congress for years and protected at all costs by Democrats, faced a huge problem of solvency (Update: with the insolvency starting this year) - dwarfed only by the massive unfunded liabilities looming in Medicare/Medicaid. And our ability to borrow to finance Obama's world record spending spree was rapidly deteriorating. Not only was our AAA rating for government securities in danger, but the market had already weighed in. "Two-year notes sold by the . . . Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity." Indeed, so serious are our economic woes that the "latest Fox News poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it’s possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent)." Moreover, the same poll finds that three times as many individuals, some 64%, see our national debt as a greater threat to our nation than terrorism. In short, we were, on Saturday night, in a very bad situation. And then, Sunday night, Obama and the progressive left managed to make a bad situation exponentially worse.
On Sunday night, the progressive pulled out all of the stops to pass Obamacare, taking over, directly and indirectly, one sixth of our economy (voting roll here). Instead of addressing the looming disaster of Social Security and Medicare - indeed, instead of addressing unemployment and an economy in deep distress - Obama added on top of our failing entitlement programs the biggest entitlement program of them all. And Obamacare comes replete with massive new taxes, including taxes on investment income, unfunded state mandates that will mean higher state taxes, and the assurance of skyrocketing insurance premiums. As to our national debt, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the CBO, explained the massive additions to our debt that we can expect as a result of this bill's passage.
The IRS will now expand massively as the designated arm of the state to enforce Obamacare. They will shortly begin hiring the 16,000 new agents needed to enforce the mandatory purchase of health insurance by all Americans. Over one hundred new bureaucratic offices are about to be created, all to oversee our Obamacare. As summed up by NRO, the vote last night “will increase taxes, increase premiums, and increase debt, while decreasing economic growth, job growth, and the quality of health care.” And the people are not fooled. When polled by CBS as to whether the health care plan pushed by Obama and the left was motivated by political concerns or actual concerns with health care - the majority, and even a majority of Democrats, 57%, answered that it was motivated by politics.
It is not enough to now simply say that our government runs our health care system. To give full credit where it is due, the Democrats now own it. Let's never let anyone forget that salient fact.
It looked for awhile like Bart Stupak and a handful of pro-life Democrats might hold out against language in the Senate bill that was so crafted as to allow for federal financing of abortions. Ultimately, Stupak caved in under intense pressure and with the promise that Obama would sign an executive order directing that no financing would go for abortions. An executive order does not trump the plain language of Congressional legislation. Indeed, a Court interpreting the law would likely only acknowledge the executive order in a footnote to its decision, if at all. You can bet your bottom dollar that, when the mandates become operative in a few years, there will be a law suit forcing the issue - and a court with any intellectual integrity will require that the government provide federal funding of abortion. The reality is that federal funding of abortion through Obamacare is now virtually inevitable.
Obama stated in remarks after the vote:
This is what change looks like. . . . We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.
Is Orwell now Obama's speechwriter? Health care played no role in causing our economic downturn - yet Obama pretended that it was at the heart of the problem. The plan designed by the progressive left does nothing to bend down the inflation of health care costs - yet it was sold on the basis of sound fiscal policy (Update: James Pethokoukis of Reuters no less calls it Faith Based Deficit Reduction; see also the post above, wherein Krauthammer forecasts an Obama attempt to impose a regressive VAT tax in order to fund Obamacare). Not a single poll showed that a majority of the people wanted this monstrosity - yet Obama claims a popular mandate. This was not a bill passed on its merits - it was progressive sausage made with toxic, backroom deals. All that last night proved was that the progressive left are power hungry statists willing to say and do anything in order to amass power. This is not a government that works for the people - it's a political elite that wants to control the people and punish wealth creation.
Megan McArdle, herself a throwback to old times - an intellectually honest, if a bit misguided, Democrat - summed up her thoughts at the Atlantic:
What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot box and rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent--I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.
As Bill Kristol points out, this is by no means over, even now. Republicans are planning a series of parliamentary procedural moves that may yet impact final passage of proposed changes to the bill. But the real challenge lays in the upcoming elections. "[W]hat Republicans have to do is to make the 2010 and the 2012 elections referenda on Obamacare, win those elections, and then repeal Obamacare." Truer words were never spoken.
James Fallows, on the other hand, writing at the Atlantic thinks that "this will not seem anywhere near as poisonous seven months from now as it does today." He is living in a dream world if he thinks, after the election of Brown to Kennedy's seat in blue Mass., after the birth of the Tea Party movement so maligned out of fear by the left, this will all blow over. At the Politico, they speculate as to which Democrat seats are now in danger as a result of their vote last night on health care. No need to speculate. The answer is every damn one of them.
Even John McCain has put the left on notice that they should not expect any cooperation in Congress from the right after their actions of the past year:
"There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year," McCain said during an interview Monday on an Arizona radio affiliate. "They have poisoned the well in what they've done and how they've done it."
No, they didn't just poison the well, they urinated in it. And we really should go one further than McCain. If you hear anyone mention the word "bipartisan" again, in any suggesting that the Republicans should cooperate with the Obama administration, the only appropriate response is a swift and powerful kick to the groin. Repeat as necessary until the person expressing this obscenity has undergone a complete and permanent attitude adjustment.
While it will be several years before the full weight of Obamacare will be felt, some of the provisions, including ones directly attacking the health insurance industry, kick in immediately. One is a change to the acceptable ratio of payments to benefits that has long been the health insurance industry standard. The health care plan signed into law changes the acceptable ratio from 65/35 to to 85/15. In a stroke, Obama has destroyed the ability of health insurance companies to pay overhead, salaries and make a modicum of profit. In addition, the new health care bill includes a 40% rise in taxes on health insurance companies - which also must be paid from the 15. The net effect of this war on our health insurance industry will be a massive increase in premiums next January, when most plans renew, and a massive contraction of the health insurance industry as many, if not all, medium and small insurers, are forced from the market. This from a transcript of Rush Limbaugh's show on Tuesday, wherein a health insurance employee highlighted the impact of the newly passed bill:
. . .
CALLER: Okay. For time immemorial, both state and federal regulation -- and also just the industry standard -- has been a 65-45 percentage arrangement: 65 in claims payment and 45 for administration and claims expense. Withholding that you store for, you know, a major catastrophe or something.
RUSH: This is to pay your claims?
CALLER: No, 65% is to pay the claims. Thirty-five percent is for everything else.
RUSH: That means 35% is salaries, administration costs, and the offices, all the paperwork, that kind of thing?
CALLER: It's that as well as, you know, we are required to keep a certain amount of cash on hand as a percentage of our claims exposure to pay claims. . . .
RUSH: Now, I just want to make sure I understand here. State and federal regulations set those percentages?
CALLER: State and federal regulations, yes.
RUSH: So if you wanted to have 85% set aside for claims, you couldn't. You had to go at 65%?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: If you wanted 30% set aside for claims and the rest were administration, you couldn't do it. It had to be 65%.
CALLER: That's illegal, yes. It has to be 65-35, and there's a couple of percentage either way, but generally when an insurance company falls outside of those guidelines, they are considered financially unstable.
RUSH: Well, who audits you all to make sure you are within the ratio?
CALLER: We're audited by the state insurance departments, primarily. There are some plans that are audited both state and federally, and then you have your private auditors who will come in as part of the stock market and that kind of thing. So we're audited often.
. . .
CALLER: . . . So what Obama just did an hour and a half ago is make every insurance company in the country financially unstable. Remember, the 15% that we are left has not only to pay salaries, maintenance, upkeep of buildings; it also has to pay the 40% increased taxes that we've got. I mean, there's just no way. You can't do it.
RUSH: Well, you're getting a little bit ahead of me here. What did Obama sign that changes this 65-45 split? In what way did Obama now sign you into permanent instability?
CALLER: The provision in the Senate bill requires that all insurance companies pay 85% of premiums collected every year in claims.
RUSH: So the 65 is now 85?
CALLER: Exactly. It doesn't matter how much we increase the premium, it won't matter.
. . .
Rush: . . . You originally thought that your industry would survive. You're speaking industry or just your particular company?
CALLER: I would say 99% of all insurance companies, health insurance companies in the country.
RUSH: Okay. So you originally thought you might have three to five years to stay in business under Obama. Now you said it's two to three. Why?
CALLER: Because of the 85-15. Plus the additional expenses were going to incur. Additionally, the mandates, what people don't understand when CMS (which is the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare) push a mandate down on insurance companies, we have to pay to complement those mandates. We don't know how many of those are in this monstrosity. So we can have our mandate budget doubled, our taxes already up 40% or whatever it is, and our cash flow immediately cut.
RUSH: Well, how can you know in advance of paying any claims? Because they've now shifted to 65% that you have to set aside for claims to 85%. How in the world can anybody know in advance of paying claims that it's going to amount to 85%?
CALLER: Well --
RUSH: Of course 65%? It seems to be like this is a ridiculous dictate made by people that have no clue how your business works.
CALLER: Well, they don't have a clue. But the way that that amount of money is calculated is you look at the past year, past five years, past ten years, and you see what your claims expense have been those years. Then based on your enrollment and your demographics you project forward into what you expect to be paying in the future, in the next year and the next five years. So you can do that. It's not precise to a dollar, but you usually get pretty close. What he's done is by saying, for example, the preventative services now --
RUSH: Those are free. Those are, quote, unquote, "free."
CALLER: Yeah, exactly.
RUSH: What the hell is a preventative service covered by an insurance company anyway?
CALLER: Well, that would be your colonoscopies, your mammograms, your yearly physicals, your lab work.
RUSH: Oh, so those are free now! So if I want to go get a colonoscopy today and I have an insurance policy, I'm not going to pay for it?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: But you will.
CALLER: Well, we will. We'll pay out the nose for it.
RUSH: (laughing) Well...
CALLER: I know, bad analogy. I'm sorry.
RUSH: It is Christmas!
CALLER: But, Rush --
RUSH: Well, no, I don't look at a colonoscopy as Christmas. Don't misunderstand. . . . But it is Christmas in the sense that I'm not paying for it. I don't know how you can stay in business even two to three years with this kind of thing happening to you this year alone.
CALLER: I don't think we will and that's why I am seriously considering leaving this industry. I'm updating my resume. You know, people who I work with -- even people who voted for Obama and thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread -- are shell-shocked.
RUSH: That just frustrates the hell out of me. Anybody with a brain has no reason to be shell-shocked about who this guy is, but it is what it is.
. . .
CALLER: And you know how many people are going to die in the interim, Rush? I say that in all sincerity, because come January 1st you're going to see 200, 300% increases in premiums and people are going to drop their coverage. So you've got the woman who isn't going to go get the mammogram or the man who's not going to get the prostate exam.
RUSH: Wait a minute!
CALLER: People are going to die.
RUSH: I thought the mammogram was free.
CALLER: Not when you drop the coverage because you can't afford three times the premium. Remember, the premiums are going up because of the government, and jobs are being lost because of the government. If you can't pay it, you can't pay it. So people are going to drop it. They're going to drop their insurance before they drop their mortgage.
RUSH: They're going to be clamoring to the government to fix the mean-spirited insurance companies for raising the prices so high and that's where Obama's going to step in and say, "You know what? We have no choice here but than to do it ourselves," and then you get dumped on again first and foremost with Obama portraying the government as the savior. . . .
Read the entire transcript.
When Julius Caseser crossed the Rubicon river in 49 B.C., entering into Roman territory, it marked both a crossing of the point of no return and a declaration of war on the Republic. The end result was ultimately the destruction of Rome's Republican form of government. I think the analogy here is apt. Obama has so polarized politics in our government, it is questionable when or if we will see a return to rational, measured politics until either conservatism or progressivism wins out and the other is pushed into the dustbin of history. We are, as I blogged here, in a zero sum ideological war today. Never in history has the political system been so manipulated and in such a highly partisan fashion. Its provisions, mandating each person purchase health insurance, if upheld, will represent a vast expansion of the government's power to control and direct our lives. But even beyond all of that, this bill threatens not merely our health care system, but it also poses a clear and present danger to the fiscal viability of our nation.
In the end, the right must not merely repeal Obamacare, but it must present a better alternative. In that respect, Paul Ryan may in fact have the answer to Obamacare, as well as the problems of Medicare and Social Security. His "Roadmap" is a very serious attempt to address the actual problems we face. Here is hoping that Congressman Ryan is a player in 2012.
