Welcome to Deemocracy -- By: Mark Steyn | read this item
On Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to set up a committee to examine whether condoms should be required on all pornographic film shoots within the Golden State.
California has run out of money, but it hasn’t yet run out of things to regulate.
For a government regulatory hearing, the testimony was livelier than usual. The porn star Madelyne Hernandez recalled an especially grueling scene in which she had been obliged to have sex with 75 men. The bureaucrats nodded thoughtfully, no doubt contemplating another languorous 18-month committee assignment looking into capping the number of group-sex participants at 60 per scene. In future, if a porn actress finds 75 men waiting for her on the set, they’ll be bureaucrats from Sacramento’s Condom Enforcement Squad.
The committee will also make recommendations on whether the “adult” movie industry should be subject to the same regulatory regime and hygiene procedures as hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. You mean with everyone in surgical masks? Kinky. If you’ve ever been in the filthy, C. difficile- and MRSA-infected wards of Britain’s National Health Service, it may make more sense after the passage of Obamacare to require hospitals to bring themselves up to the same hygiene standards as the average Bangkok porn shoot.
One can make arguments for permitting porn and for banning porn, but there isn’t a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull, bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who’ll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for Debbie Does the Fresno OSHA Office.
Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That’s 16,500 new IRS agents, who’ll be needed to check whether you — yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens — are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to “deem” into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II — and that’s change you can believe in. This is what “health” “care” “reform” boils down to: fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. And, when you walk into the Health Care Enforcement Division of the IRS, the staffing levels will make Madelyne Hernandez’s group-sex scene look like an Equity-minimum one-man play off-off-off Broadway.
Barack Obama, a man who not so long ago had time to jet across the world to make dreary Olympics-losing speeches about how his kind of town Chicago is, has now postponed his presidential visits to Indonesia and Australia in order to make sure “health care” passes this week — or, at any rate, is “deemed” to have passed, which is apparently the way a quarter-millennium-old constitutional republic does things.
The president, his press secretary informs us, regrets having to postpone his trip for three months, but “passage of the health-insurance reform is of paramount importance.” Whereas Australia isn’t.
The visit had already been pared back to the bare minimum — a quick refueling stop in Canberra, with a speech to Parliament and a grip’n’greet with the governor-general and the prime minister. Maybe the administration could simply “deem” the visit to have occurred, photoshop a souvenir snapshot, and stick it in the mail to their eminences. In much the same way, the Deemocrats are deeming their health bill to control costs rather than actually controlling them. Medicare doesn’t reimburse doctors the cost of treating the patient; it reimburses what the bureaucracy “deems” it to have cost. In a deemocracy, this works. In real life, it’s more problematic.
Investor’s Business Daily argues that the “health” debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has “too much power.” Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they’re now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That’s all he knows and all he’s ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who’s never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who’ve demonized (deemonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama’s cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the last century. What it knows is government, and government’s default mode is to grow, and grow.
California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation — or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.
Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they’ll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don’t have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you’re entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion. Try typing that onto your pocket calculator. You can’t. There isn’t enough room for all the zeroes, and, even if they made a pocket calculator large enough, and a pocket large enough, you’d be walking with a limp. To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.
Whatever is “deemed” to have passed in the next few days doesn’t end the debate but begins it. If you’re sick of talking about health care, move to Tahiti, because in the U.S. we’re going to be talking about it until the end of time, or at least until the Iranians nuke Cleveland.
It isn’t difficult. We need less government, with smaller budgets, fewer agencies, and vastly reduced numbers of public-sector union employees on less lavish remuneration. I’m confident the California Bureau of Condom Regulators can be retrained as porn-movie bit-players and once again make a useful contribution to society. But, if you’re not in favor of shrinking government, you’re voting for national decline, remorseless and ever accelerating.
Obama and Pelosi are strong-arming swing-state congressmen into taking one for the deem. It’s appropriate that it should take banana-republic maneuvers to ram this through, because it’s about government so powerful it can make up the rules as it goes along. Maybe regulators should roll a giant condom over the Capitol before it fatally infects the rest of us.
The Preventive-Care Myth -- By: Michael Fumento | read this item
The Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday that the health-care bill would reduce the deficit. “I love numbers,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) declared as she made a last-minute pitch to pull Democrats in line for the bill — which, polls show, Americans don’t want.
Yet numbers have worked against her in a very critical area, namely the idea that preventive-care and wellness programs can save us money.
Among its thousands of pages, the House versionsets aside $33.9 billion over five years for prevention and health promotion, while the Senate versionallots $15 billion to establish a Prevention and Public Health Fund. Both bills eliminate co-pays and deductibles for many preventive screenings. Nevertheless, we’re assured it’s a sound financial investment: Because preventive care sometimes detects illnesses in early stages, when they’re cheaper to treat, or prevents expensive illnesses entirely, it saves money in the end, the argument goes.
“Routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies,” insisted President Obama, save “money and it saves lives.” Likewise, Pelosi and House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.), writing in USA Today, claimed preventive care “will save money,” and specifically citing “regular checkups and tests, such as mammograms and diabetes exams.” “Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.” That’s because, explained CBO Director Douglas W. Elmendorf, most people don’t have the ailments for which they’re being screened: “It is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway.”
A 2008 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) review of almost 600 papers found that over 80 percent of preventive measures and treatments cost more money than they save. This does indicate there can be cost savings, but neither piece of congressional legislation uses or even allows a cost-benefit approach. A 2009 Health Affairsstudy came to the same conclusion, finding, contra Obama, that screenings for colorectal and breast cancer are money losers. As for the diabetes exams Pelosi and Hoyer cited, Elmendorf noted that a 2008 study in the journal Circulation found that the recommended prevention activities for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes would cost almost ten times as much as the savings.
THE RISKS OF OVER-SCREENING In addition to the aforementioned setasides, both bills would make insurance companies pay in full for screening and other services that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has determined have medical benefits that outweigh the risk of harm. The Task Force lists 45, beginning with “Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm.”
Yet there are indicators scattered throughout both bills that Congress intends to go beyond the task force’s health-based recommendations. For example, the Senate version, because of an amendment from Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.), calls for wider use of cervical-cancer screenings. It rejects the task force’s recently announced recommendation for mammography every other year beginning at age 50. Instead it makes it every year beginning age 40.
Although that recommendation provoked outrage because both Democrats and Republicans saw it as health-care rationing, the Task Force isn’t even allowed to consider cost benefits. The reality is that between the ages of 40 and 50, 2,000 women would need to be screened regularly to prevent one breast-cancer death. Of those, the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler has explained, “between four and 20” will be “‘over diagnosed’ and get radiation, chemotherapy or a mastectomy unnecessarily.”
Notes University of Southern California health economist Joel Hay, “Benign lumps and bumps appear and disappear all the time.” Overly frequent screenings can result in “a woman going through a painful biopsy, biopsy with lymph node removal, or even full a mastectomy for something she’d never even have known she had.” Further, he says, “Some of the most aggressive cancers will still be missed.”
Likewise, Mikulski’s mandated extra cervical-cancer screenings will mean more false positives and more harmful, unnecessary invasive surgeries.
Physical harm aside, the claim that early screenings will save lives if not money is suspect. That’s because all the money wasted on unnecessary screenings drains resources for actual treatment and research. It takes just 760,000 of the recommended osteoporosis exams, at $250 apiece, to equal the entire annual federal research budget for the disease.
Money lost on needless screenings will have to come either from government deficit spending or out of insurance premiums. And both bills require nearly everyone to buy comprehensive health insurance, so you won’t be able to opt out. Thus, as either a taxpayer or a premium payer, the person shelling out for all those wonderful, wasteful “free” things will be you.
– Michael Fumento is director of the non-profit Investigative Journalism Project, where he specializes in health and science issues. He may be reached at fumento@pobox.com.
Obamacare's Imaginary Savings -- By: The Editors | read this item
President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress touted the latest cost projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as evidence that the bill they are attempting to ram through Congress this weekend is fiscally responsible. Some Blue Dog Democrats may try to use the latest projections as an excuse to switch their votes from opposition to support of Obamacare.
But if they do so, the only people they will be fooling are themselves — the public long ago saw through the gimmicks and sleight-of-hand behind the Democratic deficit-cutting claims. Voters know a runaway entitlement program when they see one, and in this case they got some crucial help from Rep. Paul Ryan and others. The bill the Democrats want to pass is a massive federal spending spree, and the claims that it will reducethe deficit do not stand up to scrutiny.
According to CBO, Obamacare’s new subsidies for health insurance would cost $216 billion by 2019 — an expense that would increase another 8 percent every year thereafter. In addition, the plan includes $130 billion in other entitlement spending, plus another $70 billion for the bureaucracy needed to implement it. All totaled, the bill would cost at least $1.2 trillion through 2019, not the $940 billion advertised by the White House.
And even that $1.2 trillion is a low-ball estimate, because the Democratic plan would do almost nothing of real consequence until 2014. But when the program’s spending measures did finally kick in, costs would soar. Over the first ten years of full implementation, the bill’s cost would grow to at least $2.5 trillion, and perhaps much more. Today, Medicare and Medicaid spend far more money — about ten times as much — as the original government estimates predicted.
Most of the offsets the Democrats are pushing to “pay for” the bill are smoke and mirrors — cuts that won’t be made, taxes that won’t be collected. But there are some measures that, if enacted, promise to inflict real damage on the American economy and on America’s seniors. Among the plan’s $560 billion in tax hikes over the next ten years is a new Medicare tax on non-wage income, a penalty on investment that would undermine business growth and job creation. And there’s the Medicare Advantage cut, more than $200 billion over ten years. This reduction would force millions of Medicare beneficiaries out of their health-insurance plans, in direct contradiction of Obama’s promise. In total, the Medicare cuts in the president’s plan now exceed $520 billion over ten years.
But most of the offsets are window dressing, helpful in making the sale but unlikely to amount to much in the end. The president wants us to believe we can count on a massive revenue surge from the “Cadillac tax” after 2020, but the unions hate the tax, and the fact that the president’s plan puts off collecting it until he is safely in retirement suggests that Democrats are not serious about enforcing the measure when the time comes.
The Democrats’ plan assumes permanent, across-the-board cuts in Medicare hospital and nursing-home payments — cuts that that would go so deep that the chief actuary of the program expects that one in five facilities would have to stop taking Medicare patients to avoid insolvency. Which means those cuts probably aren’t going to happen. We have seen this before: Even as Democrats claim these new Medicare savings can be taken to the bank, they are working to undo a similarly clumsy and ill-advised cut in Medicare physicians’ fees — at a cost of $371 billion over ten years, another massive pile of money not accounted for in the Democrats’ “savings” projections.
While much of the spending isn’t counted, a big piece of the revenue is double-counted: The Democrats’ numbers show premiums from the new long-term care insurance program, along with Social Security and Medicare surpluses, being used both to pay for the insurance subsidies and to strengthen the ailing entitlement programs. But you can’t spend the same dollar in two different places. Which means that the Democrats are trying to finance another expensive entitlement program with funds that are needed to pay for entitlement programs already on the books.
When that double-counting is omitted and the real cost of physicians’ fees is included, all of the claimed deficit-reduction from the health bill vanishes.
The recklessness of the Democratic majority is remarkable. The federal budget is already suffocating under unaffordable entitlement commitments. We can’t pay for the ones we have, and they want to create a bunch of new ones. CBO finds no “bending of the cost curve” in the president’s plan. It is nothing but high-speed spending that is almost certain to grow even more expensive than advertised. It will be financed in part with job-killing tax hikes and ideologically driven cuts to Medicare Advantage — but mainly it’s going to be papered over with accounting gimmicks and “savings” that will never materialize.
The United States is already rushing headlong toward a debt crisis, in part because of the massive spending President Obama has already pushed through the Congress. Contrary to his claims, his health plan would not reduce the deficit, in the short term or in the long term. If enacted, it would only accelerate our descent into debt, and hasten the day of reckoning.
An American Divide -- By: Jonah Goldberg | read this item
John Edwards, when he wasn’t fixing his hair or cheating on his wife, liked to talk about “two Americas.” In one America, things were pretty bad, somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath and Thunderdome. In the other America, where Edwards himself lived in a McMansion, things were going swimmingly.
Edwards was hardly the only one to use this two-Americas formulation. It’s been a popular talking point for years. Socialist intellectual Michael Harrington helped to inspire the Great Society with his book The Other America.
As serious analysis, this bifocal vision of America has always left me cold. The American economy is too dynamic, the American people too optimistic, to talk so glibly about haves and have-nots as permanent classes, the way French aristocrats talked about the peasants. More than half the people in the poorest 20 percent pull themselves out of it within a decade. Moreover, it’s all based on a kind of class envy that has never flourished in the U.S. the way it has elsewhere.
But it’s certainly fair to say that our political leaders believe in two different Americas. They even believe in two different Constitutions.
Democrats insist that health care is a “right.” It’s that conviction more than anything else that is driving their push for Obamacare.
The notion that health care is a right is an old one with deep roots in socialist and progressive thought. It achieved its highest expression in FDR’s 1944 address to Congress. The president insisted that the old Bill of Rights had run its course and the new industrial age required new rights. These rights included a guaranteed good job, a good home, and, naturally, good medical care.
“Necessitous men are not free men,” FDR insisted.
Roosevelt said that opposition to this sweeping transformation of America made you a fascist. If “history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”
Keep in mind that the 1920s was a decade of roaring economic growth. The return to “normalcy” FDR referred to was the return to a more limited form of government (not counting Prohibition). The Republicans released Woodrow Wilson’s political prisoners. They shuttered the Democrats’ propaganda ministry (the Committee for Public Information). They called off the censorship and the “war socialism” of the Wilson years. And they helped usher in roaring economic growth.
Pres. Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, the poster boy for the ’20s, was once asked what he thought of his achievements in office. He replied: “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”
That was the return to normalcy FDR was talking about. A government minding its own business, according to FDR, amounted to the spirit of fascism.
It’s not hard to see why so many liberals today take one look at the vast gatherings of decent, middle-class Americans known as tea parties and instantly think, “Fascists!” Never mind that fascists, properly understood, don’t usually demand less government intervention.
What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and that it is the government’s job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, and homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to “punish” the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed — “fascism!”
The other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn’t have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit. The Constitution is not a coupon insert in your local paper, brimming with all sorts of giveaways and two-for-one deals. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights delineate what the government cannot do, not what it can. What was so fantastic and revolutionary about that is that for the first time in history, a nation was founded on the proposition that the government should mind its own business. Believing that doesn’t make you a fascist, it makes you a patriot.
But the leaders of one America don’t see it that way, and probably never will. Which is why, whatever happens in Congress in the coming days and weeks, it will be “two Americas” for a very long time.
Obama, the Immoderate -- By: Rich Lowry | read this item
Editor’s note:This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contactkfsreprint@hearstsc.com or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246.
One of Pres. Barack Obama’s great political gifts is his moderate demeanor — cool, reasoned, self-contained. It masks the frank immoderation of everything about his final push on health-care reform.
His liberal admirers call him a centrist. He hasn’t tried to pass a single-payer system, has he? But Obama is in Washington, not Ottawa. Single-payer couldn’t possibly pass. Nor could the public option, which Obama supported until it reached its absolute expiration date. These aren’t principled acts of centrism; they are unexceptional adjustments to reality.
Obama supports the leftmost plausible bill. It’s as expansive and expensive as possible without getting so big it’s utterly impossible to stuff through Congress. Obama has blessed the unsightly procedural contortions necessary to pass the bill — the reconciliation rules in the Senate, the “deem and pass” in the House — to avoid going back in the Senate and budging another inch to the center.
Who are the recalcitrant right-wingers Obama would have to placate in order to pick off one or two Republicans and get 60 votes again in the Senate? Olympia Snowe of Maine, who voted for a version of the bill in the Senate Finance Committee before Majority Leader Harry Reid lost her by pulling the bill back left again, and Susan Collins, also of Maine, who is as pliable and prone to bipartisanship as Snowe. Obama just got 68 votes, including eleven Republicans, for a compromise $17 billion jobs bill in a Senate that we’re told is irrevocably broken.
It’s not as if a scaled-back bill was inconceivable. After the Massachusetts election, the White House prepared a Plan B covering half the uninsured at about a quarter of the cost of the current bill, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. But compromise was anathema to Obama, even though persevering in support of the maximalist bill represents a desperate gamble out of a Dostoyevsky story.
If Obama loses on the House floor, it will be a legislative rebuke for the ages, on par with the impeachment of Bill Clinton or the sinking of the League of Nations after all of Woodrow Wilson’s exertions. Obama’s early presidency would lie in ruins. He would have kicked away the political middle with nothing to show for it, appearing both overly ideological and ineffectual in a toxic, Carteresque brew. Obama is willing to court this disaster.
Even if he wins, he’s risking untold damage to his party in the backlash against the audacity of it all. A smaller-scale bill would have given the Democrats a victory while leaving vulnerable members less exposed. Instead, they will be asked to give the last measure of their devotion. No cost is too great in the glorious cause.
Obama is becoming increasingly heedless in his salesmanship. When he calls the bill a deficit-reduction measure, at least he has the backing of a Congressional Budget Office analysis that — taking all the bill’s unrealistic assumptions at face value — says it will reduce the deficit. He has no serious warrant for his otherworldly claims that it will control costs and reduce insurance premiums. The provision he has dubiously touted as a solution to rising premiums, a federal review board, won’t even make it into the final bill.
The president engaged in similarly shameless overpromising when hawking his stimulus bill. How did that turn out? He won’t even mention the word “stimulus” anymore. On health care, his most alluring promises will soon be discredited as costs, premiums, and the number of uninsured (in the near term) remain high. To paraphrase Colin Powell, if you reform it, you own it, and all the discontent with the health-care system will now adhere to Democrats.
A more cautious and shrewd leader would have avoided making easily falsifiable representations or putting himself on the hook in this way. Not Obama. On health care, he’s immoderate in his substance, his risk-taking, and his rhetoric. He’s all in, and he doesn’t care.
Chris Dodd's Big, Misguided Bill -- By: David Malpass | read this item
For more than a year Congress has been talking about reforming bank and other financial-market regulations. The regulatory system certainly needs reform — it broke down badly over the last decade. But not many of current proposals are useful.
In particular, the financial-regulation bill being sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) will add more to Washington’s power and bureaucracy without fixing core problems.
For starters, the bill doesn’t encourage much-needed loans to small businesses. How many years have to pass before Washington wakes up to this problem?
Bank lending is being constrained by the application of arbitrary valuations to bank assets and regulatory capital, along with the hesitation of regulators to use their authority to assess capital adequacy. The result is that banks are piled with cash while small businesses are cut off — which means small firms end up holding back on inventory and hiring while start-ups never get off the ground.
The Dodd bill also does not address the huge advantage big banks have over the smaller banks that make many of the small-business loans.
It also doesn’t speak to needed adjustments in the recently passed credit-card bill. A supposedly well-meaning provision in this legislation restricted future rate increases on outstanding credit-card balances. But this had a predictable effect: Banks raised rates preemptively, making an important source of funds for small businesses prohibitively expensive. Will the Dodd bill undo this portion of the credit-card law? Don’t hold your breath. When Congress legislates in haste, it often causes more problems than it solves. But Congress rarely reconsiders its mistakes.
The Dodd legislation also does little to resolve the giant mortgage mess still facing Washington and the economy. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are losing billions of dollars each quarter, are unresolved in the bill. They’re not even counted in the budget deficit or national debt, even though they are clearly borne by taxpayers.
The losses on loans made prior to the financial crisis project to be in the range of $600 billion or more, and new mortgage renegotiations are adding to that amount every day. These losses dwarf the taxpayer losses from the bank rescues and TARP, yet Congress won’t touch the Fannie/Freddie problem because it exists inside the Beltway. In other words, the Fannie/Freddie money trail points straight back to Congress.
Another pressing problem is the regulation of derivatives. The Dodd bill addresses this, but in a way that may further delay the solution. Existing agencies have the power to regulate these critical markets, but they aren’t doing the job, and the Dodd legislation provides cover for more of the same. Lost in the shuffle is aggressive transparency for counterparty positions, which has been needed for years, along with differential capital requirements that take risk into account but don’t regulate where trading takes place.
This is not to say the Dodd bill is too small. It’s big, but misguided.
The legislation creates a mega-fund in Washington responsible for bailing out not only banks, but insurance companies and other non-bank entities that don’t take deposits. In the guise of fixing the too-big-to-fail problem, this will make matters worse. It will convince markets that Washington has plans to conduct bailouts beyond the banks, and markets will interpret this as a green light to leverage up banks and non-banks as much as possible.
Why not deem the whole economy “too big to fail,” have the government do all the borrowing for everyone, and then divvy everything up? Oops, that’s exactly the direction we’re heading.
The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses. But new proposals out of Washington only reinforce the old pattern: A scenario is being created in which a major company is able to sell way too much financial product, drawing on underpriced loans in a market lulled into overconfidence by Washington’s protective umbrella.
The Dodd bill does propose a big new government department inside the Fed to protect the consumer from banks and bad financial products. But the Federal Reserve System is already overburdened with regulatory duties, and it’s a mistake for Congress to assign it yet another complicated role.
Rather than creating a new oversight department that expands Washington’s regulatory power, it would be better to use this opportunity — per the Obama administration’s notion of not letting a crisis go to waste — to streamline and concentrate the many existing consumer financial regulators in one place. This would result in a reduction of government jobs, rather than the big increase that is going on now.
Sen. Dodd is also proposing a Treasury-run regulatory oversight committee to assess risks within the global financial system. Fine, but this was the responsibility of existing agencies before the crisis. It’s unlikely that further guidance from Congress will reduce the odds of a new mega-mistake.
One of the biggest gaps in the bill is that it doesn’t address the role that the Fed’s super-low interest rates played in adding to global leverage. The Fed staked its credibility on 1 percent rates and then limited its rate hikes as the economic expansion progressed. This caused savers to subsidize borrowers, which is the reverse of what should have been happening. And now the identical problem is starting again, with the same actors assigned to watch out for damage and distortions.
By focusing on the wrong problems, the Dodd bill would make the economy worse, meaning the private sector will not be able to create the jobs the U.S. economy needs. At the same time, state and local governments won’t collect the level of tax receipts needed to pay pensions and operating expenses.
Economic and job growth require good financial regulation, proposals for which are few and far between in Washington today.
This Is a Non-Arrogant Foreign Policy? -- By: Mona Charen | read this item
Funny, President Obama was supposed to be against an arrogant foreign policy. Remember his speech in Strasbourg last spring? There had been instances, he told the European students, “where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” Those days are over, he assured them.
Leave aside the question of whether this characterization of past American arrogance was justified. President Obama now has a year of foreign policy under his belt, and in that time he has managed to snub the British prime minister, alienate the president of France, insult the nation of Honduras when it successfully defended its young democracy from a Chávez wannabe, and undercut the people of the Czech Republic and Poland by tossing aside a hard-won agreement to build a missile-defense shield.
But in no case has his own arrogance been more transparent than in his treatment of Israel. It didn’t begin with the recent spat over housing units in Jerusalem. In formulating his policy on the region, the president could have focused his energy on the problem of a terror regime racing toward acquisition of nuclear bombs. He could have noted the civil war raging between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA). He might have addressed the venomous anti-Semitism and race hatred offered as daily fare in Palestinian media and textbooks.
But from its inception, this administration has indicated that it regards Israeli behavior as the chief obstacle to peace in the region. Israel must halt settlements, the president told Prime Minister Netanyahu, or the relationship between the U.S. and Israel would suffer. After seeing the United States acting as its lawyer, the Palestinian Authority, which in the past had negotiated with Israel without preconditions, could not then set the bar lower than the U.S. president.
Though it received little attention at the time, President Obama’s rebuke of Israel at the United Nations last October was, particularly in that venue, a deeply unfriendly act. “We continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” the president intoned. As former UN ambassador John Bolton noted at the time, the use of the phrase “continued” rather than “new” potentially delegitimized every inch of land on which Jews reside. That nuance would not have been lost on the Palestinians, who regard all of Israel as “occupied territory.”
Even stipulating that the announcement of new construction in Ramat Shlomo was ill-timed, the president’s response was extraordinary. Despite the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized for the bureaucratic gaffe, the president very publicly instructed his secretary of state to call Netanyahu two days later to scold him further — a task the secretary of state apparently fulfilled with gusto.
So while the Obama administration extends its “open hand” to the butchers of Tehran (even after the hand is repeatedly slapped) and truckles to the regime in Syria, it upbraids Israel.
#page Choosing to excoriate Israel on the matter of these apartments speaks volumes about the president’s view of the conflict in general. His outrage is highly selective. Two months before Vice President Biden’s visit, Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the PA, attended a “birthday celebration” for the “martyr” Dalal Mughrabi. Mughrabi led eleven terrorists in carrying out the 1978 “coastal road” attack, the worst terror attack in Israel’s history. Coming ashore near the northern Israeli city of Haifa, Mughrabi and her heavily armed team hijacked two buses filled with tourists, forced all 71 onto one bus, and attempted to take it to Tel Aviv. Along the way, they machine-gunned motorists and some of the passengers. Bodies were dumped on the highway. When police finally stopped the bus by shooting out the tires, the terrorists killed as many people as they could (37, including 13 children) and set the bus aflame before being killed themselves.
The day after the vice president departed the region, a square near Ramallah was named for Dalal Mughrabi. Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee (the PA’s predecessor organization), told the crowd, “We are all Dalal Mughrabi.” Mughrabi is celebrated in other ways as well. Palestinian Media Watch reports that in the past two years, the PA has named two girls’ high schools, a soccer match, two summer camps, and a computer center after the “martyr.”
To get a sense of the true nature of the conflict, the president need do no more than watch kids’ television in the Palestinian areas. On the PA program Chicks, children are encouraged to “explore your country” with a map that shows the entire nation of Israel labeled “Palestine.”
I await the secretary of state’s outraged call to Abbas.
Reconciliation Could Blow Up in Dems' Faces -- By: Deroy Murdock | read this item
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and her henchpersons are whipping (that’s the technical term) Democrats to secure 216 votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill. The Senate then would approve a companion “reconciliation” measure to deodorize some of the more pungent legislative bribes and corrupt deals that helped grease the Senate legislation’s passage last Christmas Eve. Nebraska’s so-called “Cornhusker Kickback,” the “Louisiana Purchase,” and Florida’s “Gator-Aid” are among the most sinus-piercing payoffs. The 40 percent tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health plans is one of several other provisions the House hopes the Senate will remove or repair. Before they vote, however, wavering Democrats should wonder: “What if the Senate doesn’t deliver?” There is no guarantee that reconciliation will squeeze anything past the Senate, even with just 51 votes, rather than the oft-needed, filibuster-proof 60. “House Democrats are being#…#asked by the president to hold hands, jump off a cliff, and hope [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid catches them in the Senate after the bill is law,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) told CBS’s Face the Nation last Sunday.
Here are several ways the Senate could leave the House standing alone at the reconciliation altar:
Under reconciliation, senators may propose amendment after amendment, ad infinitum. Republicans could amend the Senate into paralysis. They could argue that Democrats made their hospital bed and should languish in it until November, when voters may pull the plug on the donkey party. Increasingly inflamed citizens might applaud such a GOP strategy and help Republicans dislodge Democrats for defying the American public. A March 16 Wall Street Journal/NBC survey of 1,000 adults found that only 36 percent consider Obamacare a “good idea,” while 48 percent call it a “bad idea.” (Error margin: +/- 3 percent.)
The Senate might excise some provisions that irk House members. But the Senate parliamentarian could disqualify votes on others, since reconciliation is limited to questions of taxes and spending. So, at least some items that Pelosi and company want the Senate to fix could remain law, assuming President Obama signs the Senate bill. He must do so before reconciliation can commence. Abortion far outpaces reconciliation’s revenues and outlays. So, pro-life Democrats will be bitterly disappointed if they expect the Senate to strike its own, pro-abortion language and embrace the pro-life Stupak Amendment. Insert your earplugs before imagining the reaction of Democratic senators Barbara Boxer of California or Barbara Mikulski of Maryland if anyone tried to make Stupak’s amendment law. President Obama cynically could sign the House-passed Senate bill and then develop late-onset reconcilaphobia. He and Senate Democrats could grow fond of the Senate bill. Such an Olympic-class bait and switch would enrage the already irate American public and could seal Obama’s fate as a one-term president.
However, like bees that perish after losing their stingers while defending their hive, Obama and other Democrats may commit political hara-kiri while high-fiving themselves for handing Uncle Sam 17 percent of America’s economy — a Democratic Holy Grailsince the Truman era.
Obamacare opponents should ask House Democrats: “Since so many House measures die in the Senate, why won’t this reconciliation scheme wind up in the Senate graveyard beside cap and trade, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the National Bombing Prevention Act, and 287 other initiatives the House has passed since January 2009?” (Use AmeriPAC’s phone list of key Democrats to pose this question yourself.) “Fool us once, shame on you,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.). “Fool me 290 times, shame on us.” Meanwhile, House leaders grow increasingly shady as they pound this legislative gruel down the gullets of the gagging American people. Team Pelosi may attempt to pass the Senate bill through a “self-executing rule,” whereby House members would approve a reconciliation proposal, whereupon Obamacare will be “deemed to have passed” the House without a pesky yea-or-nay vote. Pelosi praised this subterfuge: “I like it because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.” If Obama, Pelosi, and other Democrats pull this scam, Americans should deny them the cash they crave. Come April 15, citizens should tell Washington that they “deemed to pay” their taxes, and then pocket their earnings.
– Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.
The Deem-o-crats' Towering Deception -- By: Michelle Malkin | read this item
If you cannot trust government’s numbers, you cannot trust government’s words. This is the lesson of the House Democrats’ desperate promotion of a phony-baloney Congressional Budget Office analysis of their latest health-care-takeover package.
Democratic leaders leaked a solid-seeming price tag — $940 billion over ten years — before the CBO released any official comment or report. Liberal blogs and mainstream newswires started parroting Democrats’ claims that their plan “would cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next decade, and $1.2 trillion in the second decade of the plan’s implementation” — again, before the CBO had released an iota of information, and hours before the House Rules Committee posted the long-awaited reconciliation bill.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn pronounced himself “giddy” over the supposed CBO scoring. Math lover and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed: “I love numbers. They’re so precise.”
But “precise” does not mean “accurate.” And the most “precise” numbers can be utterly worthless. That is basically what CBO director Douglas Elmendorf pointed out in his summary of the unofficial preliminary analysis of Demcare:
Although CBO completed a preliminary review of legislative language prior to its release, the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consistency with the previous draft. This estimate is therefore preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections.
Translation: Garbage in, garbage out. Elmendorf’s weary number crunchers know they are just more stage props in the Oba-Kabuki health-care theater. Like the president’s partisan donor-doctors dressed up in their White House-supplied lab coats, the CBO’s statistical authorities are being exploited to lend credibility and solidity to the Democrats’ legislative vaporware.
The CBO didn’t release its non-report because it was finished. The agency released it because Democrats needed cover for their bogus transparency pledge to post the bill 72 hours before voting on it (which they still didn’t fulfill).
The good news is that the number crunchers say they may have a real, final, useful analysis done by Sunday. The bad news is that House Democrats — moving forward with their “deem-and-pass” trickery — are scheduled to ram this monstrosity through by Sunday.
Pelosi touted fantasy savings from cutting Medicare waste, fraud, and abuse totaling some $500 billion over the first ten years of the Demcare plan. But House Democrats are relying on reaping massive dividends from Medicare reimbursement cuts that no one in Congress has had the courage to make. They also set aside the projected $200 billion so-called “doctor fix” to Medicare to make their math fit.
The first four years of Demcare clock in at $17 billion, which means the last six would cost a whopping $923 billion. As the CBO noted, it “does not generally provide cost estimates beyond the 10-year budget projection period” — with second-decade projections subject to “an even greater degree of uncertainty” than its projections for the first decade.
Yet, over the past week, Democratic leaders blithely jiggered and re-jiggered their plan to get below a trillion-dollar spending threshold. Like the children’s building-block game of Jenga, they stacked tax hikes and subsidies onto Medicare cuts and illusory savings until a rickety tower of budget deception was formed. Then they gingerly slid out the priciest pieces, rearranged them all and pushed back the spending kick-ins until the resulting edifice stood steady long enough to stay beneath twelve zeroes for a passing moment.
There’s an old saying that “figures don’t lie, but liars sure do figure.” Every major Demcare statistic — from the inflated number of uninsured to the politicized junk-science statistic on the number of Americans who purportedly die from lack of health insurance to the mythical savings that will come from squandering “$940 billion” — is a single-payer-promoting figment of liberal imagination.
Mathematical corruption is ideological corruption. The health-care battle — and the battle over truth in government accounting — is not just about health care. It’s about the lies that will be used to ram through cap-and-trade, illegal-alien amnesty, and endless bailouts.
As Pelosi vowed last week, “Kick open that door, and there will be other legislation to follow. We’ll take the country in a new direction.” Yep — straight to a red-ink-stained hell in a handbasket.
The Biden Incident -- By: Charles Krauthammer | read this item
Why did Pres. Barack Obama choose to turn a gaffe into a crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations?
And a gaffe it was: the announcement by a bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry of a housing expansion in a Jewish neighborhood in north Jerusalem. The timing could not have been worse: Vice President Joe Biden was visiting, Jerusalem is a touchy subject, and you don’t bring up touchy subjects that might embarrass an honored guest.
But it was no more than a gaffe. It was certainly not a policy change, let alone a betrayal. The neighborhood is in Jerusalem, and the 2009 Netanyahu-Obama agreement was for a ten-month freeze on West Bank settlements excluding Jerusalem.
Nor was the offense intentional. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did not know about this move — step four in a seven-step approval process for construction that, at best, will not even start for another two to three years.
Nonetheless the prime minister is responsible. He apologized to Biden for the embarrassment. When Biden left Israel on March 11, the apology appeared accepted and the issue resolved.
The next day, however, the administration went nuclear. After discussing with the president specific language she would use, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu to deliver a hostile and highly aggressive 45-minute message that the Biden incident had created an unprecedented crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations.
Clinton’s spokesman then publicly announced that Israel was now required to show in word and in deed its seriousness about peace.
Israel? Israelis have been looking for peace — literally dying for peace — since 1947, when they accepted the U.N. partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.)
Israel made peace offers in 1967, in 1978, and in the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Yasser Arafat tore up seven years later to launch a terror war that killed a thousand Israelis. Why, Clinton’s own husband testifies to the remarkable courage and vision of the peace offer made in his presence by Ehud Barak (now Netanyahu’s defense minister) at the 2000 Camp David talks. Arafat rejected it. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered equally generous terms to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Refused again.
In these long and bloody 63 years, the Palestinians have not once accepted an Israeli offer of permanent peace, or ever countered with anything short of terms that would destroy Israel. They insist instead on a “peace process” — now in its 17th post-Oslo year and still offering no credible Palestinian pledge of ultimate coexistence with a Jewish state — the point of which is to extract preemptive Israeli concessions — such as a ban on Jewish construction in parts of Jerusalem conquered by Jordan in 1948 — before negotiations for a real peace have even begun.
Under Obama, Netanyahu agreed to commit his center-right coalition to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians; assisted West Bank economic development to the point where its GDP is growing at an astounding 7 percent a year; and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Secretary Clinton herself called “unprecedented.”
What reciprocal gesture, let alone concession, has Abbas made during the Obama presidency? Not one.
Indeed, long before the Biden incident, Abbas refused even to resume direct negotiations with Israel. That’s why the Obama administration has to resort to “proximity talks” — a procedure that sets us back 35 years to before Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem.
And Clinton demands that Israel show its seriousness about peace?
Now that’s an insult.
So why this astonishing one-sidedness? Because Obama likes appeasing enemies while beating up on allies — therefore Israel shouldn’t take it personally (according to Robert Kagan)? Because Obama wants to bring down the current Israeli coalition government (according to Jeffrey Goldberg)?
Or is it because Obama fancies himself the historic redeemer whose irresistible charisma will heal the breach between Christianity and Islam or, if you will, between the post-imperial West and the Muslim world — and has little patience for this pesky Jewish state that insists brazenly on its right to exist, and even more brazenly on permitting Jews to live in its own ancient, historic, and now present capital?
Who knows? Perhaps we should ask those Obama acolytes who assured the 63 percent of Americans who support Israel — at least 97 percent of those supporters, mind you, are non-Jews — of candidate Obama’s abiding commitment to Israel.
