Category Archives: Government

Updated: The CBOafs (They Really Can’t Count)

Barack Obama, Business, Government, Healthcare, Reason, Regulation, Socialism

In trying to sell the viability of BO’s Health plans, the oafs at the Congressional Budget Office (CBOafs) posit at least one scenario that doesn’t wash. Check the tables attached (via the WSJ). The CBOafs would like you to believe that an employer will choose NOT to drop a $10,000 health benefit for a paltry penalty of $750, thus saving $9,250, in the case of a high-valued employee. In an employer’s market??! Where are they living? Have they even surveyed the private sector?

This is, it would seem, a postulate ObamaCare is premised upon. The bastards.

NA-BC960A_BIZHE_NS_20091222215544

Update I (Dec. 23): THEY REALLY CAN’T COUNT. The “CBO has discovered an error in the cost estimate released yesterday,” the correction of which “reduces the degree to which the legislation would lower federal deficits in the decade after 2019,” confessed the Chief CBOaf. The entry, tucked away on the “Director’s Blog,” made select TV headlines today.

Call me simple, but with the prospect of merging one Bill (The House’s) that’s estimated to cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years (according to the “nonpartisan” CBOafs) with another (The Senate’s) priced at $871 billion over the next 10 years (CBOafs again)—I’m unclear how the cost curve, as they put it, will be bent.

Updated: The CBOafs (They Really Can't Count)

Barack Obama, Business, Government, Healthcare, Reason, Regulation, Socialism

In trying to sell the viability of BO’s Health plans, the oafs at the Congressional Budget Office (CBOafs) posit at least one scenario that doesn’t wash. Check the tables attached (via the WSJ). The CBOafs would like you to believe that an employer will choose NOT to drop a $10,000 health benefit for a paltry penalty of $750, thus saving $9,250, in the case of a high-valued employee. In an employer’s market??! Where are they living? Have they even surveyed the private sector?

This is, it would seem, a postulate ObamaCare is premised upon. The bastards.

NA-BC960A_BIZHE_NS_20091222215544

Update I (Dec. 23): THEY REALLY CAN’T COUNT. The “CBO has discovered an error in the cost estimate released yesterday,” the correction of which “reduces the degree to which the legislation would lower federal deficits in the decade after 2019,” confessed the Chief CBOaf. The entry, tucked away on the “Director’s Blog,” made select TV headlines today.

Call me simple, but with the prospect of merging one Bill (The House’s) that’s estimated to cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years (according to the “nonpartisan” CBOafs) with another (The Senate’s) priced at $871 billion over the next 10 years (CBOafs again)—I’m unclear how the cost curve, as they put it, will be bent.

Interminable Time On The Tarmac

Government, Political Economy, Private Property, Regulation, The State

Obama the idiot truly believes that nothing can work without his supervision. He had his stooge order the airlines “to let passengers stuck in stranded airplanes get off the plane after three hours.” How nice.

The AP: “Under the new regulations, airlines operating domestic flights will be able only to keep passengers on board for three hours before they must be allowed to disembark a delayed flight. The regulation provides exceptions only for safety or security or if air traffic control advises the pilot in command that returning to the terminal would disrupt airport operations.”

[SNIP]

What do you imagine will be the unintended consequences of this little exercise? Since Obama’s handmaiden, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, has authorized the act of keeping people on the tarmac for three hours, such delays will become standard.

At least up until now, this conduct resulted in unflattering publicity and law suits.

Look, the way the already heavily-regulated airlines treat customers (and vice versa) is appalling. But the solution is not to be found in Obama’s bag of tricks.

Rather, “Only when an airline can undertake ‘curb-to-curb’ handling of its passengers will it stand both to reap the benefits that arise from providing superior service, as well as incur full liability for forsaking passenger safety. This is possible only in a privatized airport, where freedom of association and freedom of contract aren’t overridden or blurred by government, and where responsibility isn’t collectivized.” [“WHOSE PROPERTY IS IT ANYWAY?”]

Crashing A Trashy House

Ethics, Etiquette, Government, Justice, Politics, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

What’s another couple of malfeasants at the Obama home?

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “Crashing A Trashy House”:

“It took a little over a week. In no time at all, Congress convened to hold hearings into an event that has left Americans – or the few remaining souls not cyber stalking Tiger Woods – deeply shaken.

And no, the ‘dreadfuf’ event I am talking about is not the massacre perpetrated by the jihadi, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, at Fort Hood, where 43 military personnel paid a cruel price for the criminal negligence of their superiors.

No one will be convening on Capitol Hill to hear who was culpable for that savagery. Not any time soon.

The investigation into the killing of 13 soldiers and the wounding of 30 by the Muslim serviceman who was coddled by the military and intelligence establishments has been consigned to a commission of inquiry that will, indubitably, exercise great political dexterity in killing accountability. For now, Hasan has been airbrushed out of the story.

The hearings ongoing at the time of writing will probe a far more urgent matter than mass murder on a military base by a fifth columnist.

As I write, The House Homeland Security Committee is investigating the infiltration of the White House by Tareq and Michaele Salahi. The two reality TV ‘stars’ had crashed – or livened up – President Obama’s first White House state dinner on Tuesday, Nov. 24. By Thursday, Dec. 3, our generally dysfunctional representatives and their proxies had summonsed the players in that farce to an inquisition on The Hill. …

The complete column is “Crashing A Trashy House.”

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