Category Archives: Welfare

Mitch (McConnell), Mark (Levin), And The Military Industrial Complex

Military, Republicans, The State, Welfare

In an effort to further marginalize those “Republican challengers further to the … right who have few qualms about trimming military budgets,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been rattling the defense industry with threats that “spending cuts” favored by tea party-aligned Republicans will come at the expense of “robust national-security spending.”

We can only hope so.

Writes Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker:

What he’s really saying is that he’s a big spending Republican [IM: is there any other kind?] who will take care of these special interests if they help him in the primary …’It’s, you scratch my back, I will scratch your back.’

What I don’t get is this: This story I got from an exercised Mark Levin. The broadcaster, an unwavering champion of the warfare state and the welfariate that mans it, was irate. Why? Isn’t Mitch, on this front, more aligned with Mark than “tea party-aligned candidates,” some of whom wish to cut military spending?

Millennials Deserve What They Get. But Are Boomers Ready For What They’ll Dish Out?

America, Debt, Elections, Family, Healthcare, Pop-Culture, Welfare

My Millennial readers are the best and the brightest. They’ll probably agree that, for the most, theirs is “a generation of idle trophy kids” (a Jennifer-Graham coinage).

Still, America worships youth, no matter how dumb. (The economically nascent Chinese do the exact opposite: revere experience.) To enhance his cool quotient, every Boommer and Gen Xer on TV has been belaboring the theme of generational theft. The country’s national debt amounts to stealing from “our children.” Obamacare sticks it to the kids.

Boohoo.

In this vein, you’ve watched John Stossel “taking toys from babies” to instantiate the burden on da babies of $280 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities.

Avik Roy at Forbes beats on breast: “Why Aren’t Millennials Marching In The Street Over Obamacare?” Roy wants to know. After all, people his age have declared war on the “generation born between 1977 and 1995.”

… by design, this law can work if and only if enough young people are willing to pay premiums far higher than are actuarially fair in order to subsidize workers my age who on average earn far more than the young workers who are subsidizing them. Even if one takes into account that Millennials in the long run eventually will become old themselves and benefit from these subsidies, Obamacare still is an extraordinarily bad deal that effectively would force today’s 18-year olds to pay 18 percent more for their medical care over a lifetime than if each generation paid its own way. Such an age-related tax is unconscionable. Imagine if sales taxes or income taxes included a surcharge for everyone who happened to be a twenty-something. If this idea sounds preposterous, welcome to Obamacare.

Highly productive, wealthy, well-employed, slightly older sorts, who’ve worked hard for what they have, are hard at work generating contempt for their kind.

Lord knows that Millenials—Ms. Graham calls them the “new American idle”—will rise to the occasion. They will dish out contempt and much more. Ask and they’ll oblige.

I sincerely hope the contempt they’ve ginned up for themselves sits well with Boomers and Gen Xers. Since Millenials are big on Obama—and thus deserve everything they get, from more debt to ZerO. Care—I’m sure they’ll also grow into the idea of rationing care for their elders (death panels).

Politically, Millennials were among Barack Obama’s strongest supporters in 2008, backing him for president by more than a two-to-one ratio (66% to 32%)

Be careful what you wish for, stupid. There is no need to teach your precious progeny still more disrespect for their elders.

The No-Good Obama Has Altered American Medicine For Good

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation, Welfare

Dr. Ramin Oskoui spoke extremely knowledgeably, on the Laura Ingraham Show, about the precise connection between curtailed medical care and ObamaCare. These are a few of the many ways in which the creep-in-chief’s signature legislation will degrade American medicine:

* Cancer: The concept of personalized medical care and the use of specific, state-of-the-art drugs that work with the individual’s genetic make-up—these will diminish considerably. ObamaCare puts access to “crucial medical progress at great risk.”

* PET scans, for example, will be limited to three in a lifetime, although cancer patients often have that many during initial diagnosis.

ObamaCare aims to control costs, explained Dr. Oskoui. For cancer patients this is achieved by blocking the patient’s ability to seek out specialized doctors. Because insurance provides cannot adjust premiums and benefits, the only thing they can do to control costs is to limit access and care—they must limit the network of providers with which they contract.

Bundle payments: doctors get lump sums of money to care for patients with particular conditions. This coerces them to cut down on the use of costlier, newer drugs and tests. It also pits what the doctor earns for caring for these patients against his payment, reducing his incentives to offer the best of remedies if these are more costly.

After all, doctors in private practice are small businessmen. They cannot provide a service for less than it costs them to provide.

Even if ObamaCare collapses under its own weight, warns Dr. Oskoui, it has “already changed the medical landscape.” Many specialists have migrated to the hospital system because, as “favored providers,” hospital-based medics are allowed to bill more than they would when working for themselves.

Both the host and this intelligent cardiac surgeon have concluded that ObamaCare is not about the practice of medicine, but about wealth distribution.

It is a tax bill.

“The entire medical landscape,” observed Ms. Ingraham, “has shifted to help the few who didn’t want healthcare or couldn’t afford it. (A point made back in 2009 in “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured.”)

Dr. Oskoui: ObamaCare has transferred financial risk to the providers of healthcare and away from Big Pharma, the insurers, those receiving healthcare. The latter, and the electronic health-records manufacturers, profit.

Again: it’s a wealth-transfer program; an entitlement program.

Sign-Up For Food Stamps, Y’all

Democracy, Journalism, Morality, Taxation, The State, Welfare

Fox News Reporting does superb shoe-leather reporting on “the government’s startling attempts to get even more people to sign up for the ‘Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.'” However, that the state uses the private property of one segment of the population to buy the favors of another is not startling; it’s standard operating procedure (SOP).

The special uncovers startling statistics, including:

Food stamps cost taxpayers 78.4 billion in fiscal year 2012. In 2008, the figure was $37.6 billion.
(Source: USDA: SNAP Program Data)

Simply administering the food stamp program alone costs close to $4 billion annually.
(Source: SNAP, 2012 Annual Summary)

Almost 48 million people are now on food stamps — one out of every seven people living in America.
(Source: 2013 SNAP Program data)

That ranges from six percent in Wyoming to 22 percent Mississippi.
(Source: USDA, SNAP Participation statistics)

Still, not everyone who can sign up, does. A 2012 report said that 75 percent of eligible people in the United States received SNAP benefits in fiscal year 2010.
(Source: USDA State Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation Rates)

In North Carolina, seventeen percent of the population receive food stamps — more than double the number a decade ago.
(Source: USDA SNAP State Program Data and Census for NC population, 2012 and 2004)

According to a Fox News poll, the majority believe that Americans are too dependent on government

Had Fox News done its bit for literacy and for the written word, rather than provide big video clips—I’d have been able to excerpt Charles Murray speak to the saddest aspect of food-stamp recruitment: the undermining of the American pride and spirit.

MORE.

More snippets from “The Great Food Stamp Binge”:

With one in seven Americans now receiving food stamps, a Fox News investigative team traveled the country to expose the government’s startling attempts to get even more people to sign up for the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”.
This documentary profiles a blissfully jobless California surfer who expects taxpayers to underwrite his life of beaches and booze, visits a Florida pastor angry over Spanish ads designed to convince reluctant immigrants to get on food stamps, and reveals how North Carolina social workers won a government award for breaking down the “Mountain Pride” that makes some Tar Heels unwilling to accept government handouts.
Reports by John Roberts and Peter Boyer also explore whether the food stamp program can ultimately make the poor dependent on government, and ask how many taxpayer dollars meant for the truly needy end up in the pockets of those able to fend for themselves.