Links and Minifeatures 2009 03 04 Wednesday
WOW! Most important article I've seen in months!
If we wish to get health-care costs under control, then we should at least be honest with the American people and admit that we are all paying a collective fortune largely for three reasons: (1) to keep functioning into their 60s those who drank, smoked, and ate too much and in a past era would have passed on at 60; (2) to give us all an extra three to five years of mobility and functionality after we reach 75; (3) to fit us up with IVs, feeding tubes, and respirators so that in our last six months of life we can die in a rest home or among machines and specialists in a hospital rather than in our own home with a few morphine tablets for pain and a bowl of soup with a straw on the nightstand.
If we're going to keep spending all this money, we have to understand that it comes with a price. And it's not just health care.
Looks like even some Democrats are starting to understand that class warfare doesn't work - or at least that it will impact their campaign contributions
Obama aides to defend budget plan to Congress
Lawmakers in both parties question Obama's call to reduce high-income earners' tax deductions for the interest on their house payments and for charitable contributions. Also drawing fire is his proposal to start taxing industries on their greenhouse gas pollution - a move sure to raise consumers' electric rates.
and
"This massive hidden energy tax is going to work its way through every aspect of American life," said Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee. "How we light our homes, heat our homes and pay for the gas in our cars, in every phase of our daily lives, we will be paying higher costs."
Will Obama Stand Up for These Kids?
That's the reality that the Parkers and 1,700 other low-income students face if Sen. Durbin and his allies get their way. And it points to perhaps the most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children -- mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never let their own kids set foot.This double standard is largely unchallenged by either the teachers' unions or the press corps. For the teachers' unions, it's a fairly cold-blooded calculation. They're willing to look the other way at lawmakers who chose private or parochial schools for their own kids -- so long as these lawmakers vote in ways that keep the union grip on the public schools intact and an escape hatch like vouchers bolted.
In short, better schools for the well off politicians children (and children of other limousine liberals), but not for the children of the working class. Can't contribute to breaking the stranglehold of teacher's unions, a Democratic constituency.
But they have enormous economic significance. Those who earn more than $200,000 pay almost 60 percent of America's income taxes and account for a third of its total disposable income. If these spenders and investors are hunkering down, waiting for the revenuers to beat down their doors, their confidence will be anything but robust. Their spending will drop; they'll be unlikely to invest (except in new tax shelters).
This is economically assured self-destruction. These folks are the ones that create jobs for ordinary people. Their struggles to increase their income makes for more and better jobs. They put in hundred hour weeks so they can expand their businesses. But when everything extra they earn would be confiscated, why should they bother?
Lest you not understand, you want them to bother. That's where all these beautiful high paying jobs come from. That's where they get the money to pay taxes. What happens when these extremely productive people decide they'd rather live in Hong Kong or Mumbai? Without these people, we're eventually looking at turning into Zimbabwe, if not Somalia. They are why we became the world's economic powerhouse. It wasn't the government that created our Oil or Steel or Railroad (or Automobile or Airplane or Semi-Conductor or ...) industries - it was entrepreneurs looking to make money. They are why people have jobs and cars and homes and cell phones and computers and internet instead of horse drawn plows. The government didn't do it. Individual people building businesses so they could make money did it.
Communism is an experiment that has been tried about 100 times in the last 92 years. It has never worked once, and while they were failing in spectacular fashion, they have led to all but one of the worst human disasters of the last 100 plus years and something north of 100 million murders. Even the exception has a lot more in common with communism than the capitalist system.
This guy understands: Entrepreneurs are best stimulus for the economy. It really isn't a stretch. We did this once in the early eighties, and it worked. There was more turnover in the Fortune 500 under Ronald Reagan than the previous fifty years. It wasn't that old companies were necessarily dying, although a few did. It was that the Reagan tax cuts opened the doors for newer, more efficient businesses.
Tax the Rich and What Do You Get?
In short, a complete klutz has a better chance of joining the Flying Wallendas than the bottom 95% of taxpayers do of getting a tax cut. Instead, they will all see a significant tax hike, whether in their marginal rates, in excise taxes, corporate taxes, fuel taxes, or other forms of indirect taxation. And as those taxes begin to mount up, and the national debt does it's best imitation of the Challenger, people will work and produce less and less, and tax revenues will dry up.That is the plan for our recovery. Read it and weep.
Michelle Obama's Patient-Dumping Scheme
The University of Chicago Medical Center has received a good deal of justly opprobrious press over its policy of "redirecting" low-income patients to community hospitals while reserving its own beds for well-heeled patients requiring highly profitable procedures. Substantial coverage was given to a recent indictment of the program by the American College of Emergency Physicians. ACEP's president, Dr. Nick Jouriles, released a statement suggesting that the initiative comes "dangerously close to 'patient dumping,' a practice made illegal by the Emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act, and reflected an effort to 'cherry pick' wealthy patients over poor."
You sure you want these people running the only health care there is?
Things That Need To Be Said...Unofficially (for now)
Investors are not going to sit around and wait to have their Euro-denominated paper revalued in Drachma. They'll immediately start dumping that paper, and moving all the assets they can out of not only the offending nation, but any other country that looks like a weak sister. As the article Bruce quoted notes, "Such a wholesale shift would lead to a collapse in the money supply..." Gee, you think?
The era of governments being able to borrow money at will is on its last legs - mostly because so many of them have abused the ability worse than homeowners ever abused stated income loans.
McCain Slams Obama: "So Much For Change"
Jim Cramer: different subject, same conclusion:
You help grade Obama:
An Assault on Authentic Compassion
President Obama is willing to see private charitable giving to the poor decrease in order to see the scope and size of government increase. These are the actions of an ideologue, not a "pragmatist."The Obama budget is going to give us a record fiscal deficit. It will create a troubling compassion deficit, as well.
If it wasn't already obvious, this week's $30 billion check that the U.S. Treasury handed to insurer American International Group should demonstrate the folly of propping up crippled companies.This is the fourth bailout to AIG, which already has put over $170 billion in government funds at risk, and it won't be the last. AIG lost $62 billion in the last three months of 2008.
Once we admit they're too big to fail, we commit ourselves to propping them up. But if they don't turn themselves around, that amounts to a continuing unlimited drain on taxpayers. Furthermore, having access to the federal checkbook gives many companies (such as GM) an excuse not to undertake needed actions and reform to return to profitability. In short, the taxpayers are funding companies that now have very little incentive to compete.
And in the case of Sen. Obama, in his nascent career in the Senate, he had already compiled the most partisan record of any Democratic Senator. He had attended religiously one of the most racially divisive and extremist churches in the country. His Chicago friends were not moderates. His campaigns for state legislature, the House and the Senate were hard-ball, no-prisoner affairs of personal destruction, even by Chicago standards. Campaign references to reparations, gun- and bible-clingers, and Rev. Wright's wisdom were not words of healing.
President Obama: Just because you can rely upon traditional media to spin the story in whatever way is most favorable to you doesn't mean that folks won't figure out that it's not the truth eventually. It's been just over a month now, and more people are figuring it out all the time. Jimmy Carter had a far more monolithic media with fewer alternative channels available, and people still figured it out en masse in time for the 1978 midterms.
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