Category Archives: Government

Sick-Making Hussein And His Health Care

Barack Obama, Business, Economy, Government, Healthcare, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Not that I doubted it, but Mitt Romney was not “lying” when he told stupid voters that their health care would go up, under ObamaCare, by about $2000-$3000 annually. Before Creep Care this household enjoyed 100 percent coverage. Shortly after Creep Care became law, we were notified, like millions around the country, in an upbeat letter, that healthcare experts were hard at work hammering out the details of how they would continue to care for us under current conditions (and still stay in business).

Our plan has now altered what was once 100% coverage to a high-deductible plan with a health savings account. This could cost us up to 2000, even 3000, additional dollars a year.

The great John Stossel entertained a healthcare expert who reminded viewers for the umpteenth time that the employer mandate decrees that every employer employing more than 50 people must provide a one-size fits all government designed plan to his workers. This indeed will cost twice as much as the plans that employers currently offer.

The costs of this employer mandate are such that it’s cheaper for the owner to pay a penalty for denying coverage—all the more so when compliance may see a business go under.

Employer-mandated healthcare will add $1.75 per-hour (“every hour”) to the cost of a worker. Who does this onerous mandate hurt? Entry level hires, as $1.75 per hour doesn’t much matter when you are hiring a neurosurgeon. However, 2000 additional dollars a year for a relatively unskilled worker whose productivity—output per unit of labor—is not that high: That’s not worth it.

That ass with ears (Barack) doesn’t understand that a businessman cannot pay a worker (or fork out for him) in excess of his productivity and hope to stay in business.

Thanks to our Creep-in-chief, people who had full-time employment and insurance may now find themselves downgraded to part-time employees with no insurance, or to the ranks of the unemployed with no job and no insurance.

To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi: That’s The Question

Democracy, Democrats, Government, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State, War, Welfare

“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question,” and that’s the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The gist of a cable received by the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on August 16 this year, summarized an emergency meeting convened a day before at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The post could not be defended in the case of a coordinated attack. Such an attack was in the air, as Benghazi was home to “approximately ten Islamist militias” raring to go. The compound was small and understaffed. It lacked “the manpower, security measures, and weapons capabilities” to repel an all-out assault.

The cable laid out before Mrs. Clinton’s Emergency Action Committee what Fox News’ Catherine Herridge described, on Oct. 31, as “specific warnings” and “detailed intelligence.”

Fox News has been covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all. However, one specific snippet buried in the telegram was too fraught for the folks at Fox to probe.

In “liberated” Libya, the American outpost was also up against limited “host nation support.”

This was a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. Living under de facto American occupation had enraged the occupied. Anathema to “free” Americans, this generic creature had evinced similar rage when he lived under Genghis Bush, in Iraq.

At first, the eminence grise of American opinion makers—left and right, Republican and Democrat—got behind the central conceit floated by the Obama Administration. The Arab world had once again erupted because of those of us who dared to insult Mohammad, Jihad’s muse. As the other set of despots used to intimate during its tenure in D.C., the perennial Muslim rioter resented the freedoms of our pole dancers, potty-mouthed entertainers, and loud, loutish politicians.

From the stuff that makes us “free,” these proxies for American power always exclude the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), authorized to hound us till end of the world, the alphabet soup of regulation agencies that prosecutes and regiments our best and brightest to the gills, the War on Drugs that assumes dominion over the most precious piece of real estate we own—our bodies—a welfare state that has been likened “not [to] a principality, but [to] a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world,” and a warfare complex that gobbles up so much wealth and so many men, ours and others around the world.

As soon as it was discovered that these things—the accoutrements of a “wonderfully” messy democracy—could not be blamed for the attack on the Benghazi Mission, most media fell silent. …

The complete column is“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question.” Read it on WND now.

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Storms Create Jobs (And Stupidity Springs Eternal)

Debt, Government, Inflation, Labor, Political Economy

You won’t hear Shepard Smith of Fox News suggest that, in order to create jobs in their own communities, people should set fire to their homes, and so help spur economic activity among local builders, landscapers, plumbers, and electricians.

But there the anchor was today, in Studio B, touting the economic benefits that would accrue from natural destruction.

The scale of Sandy the Storm guaranteed that it was a matter of time before John Maynard Keynes’ central stupidity would surface in the media. The stupidity Mr. Smith was giving voice to today is that out of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction will come jobs to revive the stricken region.

Residence along the battered eastern seaboard should hang tough, said Shep. Federal aid was on the way. Think about all the jobs that will be created in rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy.

As this thinking goes, war too is good for the economy, even though war always destroys individually owned real assets and capital.

The same goes for a storm such as Sandy.

For every dollar the government will spend, a dollar will be siphoned from you and me.

Like any committed statist, Shep sees big government—huge public works—and big deficits (especially during depressions), not as a bane but as a blessing, to be embraced as the key to economic boom.

In the short term, destruction will benefit some at the expense of others. The government will confiscate private property in the form of taxes (or steal wealth by stealth through its inflationary monetary policy) so as to create Shep’s imagined industries. These jobs will by short lived and unsustainable. For every government job generated, a real job will be lost in the private economy.

Man-Of-The People Myth

Democrats, Elections, Government, The State

In what deluded universe can it be said that Vice President Joe Biden is a champion of the working class? Notwithstanding Biden’s alleged humble origins, the man has been a pampered member of the “oink sector” (government) since 1972.

To be fair, it’s not Biden who insists his roots are in the working class; it’s his acolytes across the media. Not much has changed since 2008, when Steve Chapman debunked the man-of-the people myth:

…the legend of Joe Biden, born in a welding shop, dies hard with political reporters, who find it easier to romanticize a gritty, hardscrabble childhood than a conventionally comfortable one.
The facts are there for anyone who wants to look at them. When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002, his obituary in the News-Journal of Wilmington reported that when he married in 1941, “he was working as a sales representative for Amoco Oil Co. in Harrisburg.”
It went on, “Biden also was an executive in a Boston-based company that supplied waterproof sealant for U.S. merchant marine ships built during World War II. After the war, he co-owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island.” Upon moving his family to Delaware, the News-Journal said, Biden “worked in the state first as a sales manager for auto dealerships and later in real-estate condominium sales.”
Executive, co-owner and manager? Those titles identify the jobholder as solidly middle class, if not better.
They fall in the category of white-collar occupations, not blue-collar.
And Biden Sr. clearly knew the difference. In his book, “Promises to Keep,” Biden writes that his father was “the most elegantly dressed, perfectly manicured, perfectly tailored car sales manager Wilmington, Del., had ever seen.”
Biden notes that he himself could have gone to the best public high school in Delaware. Instead, he enrolled at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school that made him think he had “died and gone to Yale.” He took a summer job to help pay the steep tuition, which today amounts to $18,450 a year.
…So where did he get his working-class reputation? Partly it comes from Biden’s streetwise demeanor and his preoccupation with the fact that his family wasn’t as well-off as some of the people he knew — which seems to have given him a permanent chip on his shoulder. Partly it comes from his frequent tributes to blue-collar folks, such as the firefighters who took him to the hospital when he suffered an aneurysm.
But mostly it reflects journalists’ weakness for simple, vivid narratives. It’s easy to write about a statesman who worked his way up from a log cabin. It’s easy to write about a leader who came from great wealth. But someone growing up the son of a sales manager is a bit lacking in color and drama.