Rand Paul Has Been Forewarned

Elections, IMMIGRATION, Politics, Republicans

What a pity voters didn’t deal Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. the fate they dealt House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va): “In a stunning tea-party smackdown against the establishment GOP Tuesday evening, Cantor lost his bid for the Republican Party nomination against tea-party backed candidate David Brat by more than 11 percentage points.” (WND)

Where voters are aware of a candidate’s vocal support for amnesty; they’re likely to react. Rand Paul had better do an about face (something he does quite well) about amnesty.

Happy Meal Time For Miseducated Millennials

Debt, Education, Socialism, Welfare

The Ass With Ears intends to continue to keep loan rates for students artificially low, passing the cost of additional subsidies to the groaning taxpayer, and, in all, keeping the trillion-dollar education bubble afloat.

In his weekly address, President Barack Obama promised “to expand a program known as ‘Pay as You Earn.’ The plan allows borrowers to make payments on student loans equivalent to 10% of their discretionary income and then have any balance forgiven after 20 years – or 10 years for public-sector workers.” (WSJ)

“The federal government played a key role in helping create the more than $1 trillion in student loan debt currently being carried in the U.S,” reports Reason.com. “In 2012 the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey highlighted a report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, ‘The College Cost Crisis,’ which managed to identify that nearly 50 years of federal subsidies for higher education (beginning with the Higher Education Act of 1965) have helped along tuition inflation.”

… the “Pay As You Earn” program … caps their loan repayment at 10 percent of their income for 20 years after which the remainder is written off. (For professions such as nursing it takes only 10 years to get the write off.) In other words, students take loans according to their needs, and repay them according to their ability and hit taxpayers for the rest. The president wants to expand this socialist prescription to all students who receive federal loans.

(Via Reason.com)

Read about this “federally insured entitlement,” or loan socialism, here.

It’s Official: Obama Care To End Employer-Based Health Care

Business, Healthcare, Labor, Regulation

In “The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology,” I worried that, “Perhaps, like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself.”

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It had already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

A year has gone by, and the New York Times is pleased to bring tidings of these very developments, agreeing for the most with the researchers, S&P Capital IQ, that pushing people like me off coverage we like and want to keep, and onto the Idiot’s exchanges will make us gormless fools “more autonom[y] around [the] management of [our] own health care.”

The NYT is correct in that the third-payer system has turned the employer into “a social service agency.” The answer, however, is not more government, but a free-market in medicine where nothing comes between doctor and patient.

UPDATED: Government Unleashes Weaponized Migrants (The Lot Of Legals)

Government, Healthcare, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Liberty, Objectivism, Paleolibertarianism

“Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others—intentionally or unintentionally—falls perfectly within the purview of the ‘night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory'” (May 1, 2009). However, the state, in the persons of the “Treason Lobby,” won’t even perform this basic obligation:

There’s a growing health concern with hundreds of illegal immigrants crossing over into southern Texas. Cabrera says agents are seeing illegal immigrants come over with contagious infections.
Detention centers and holding facilities have quarantined areas for those who come in sick. But Cabrera says the sick and healthy are separated only by caution tape.
“There’s been an outbreak of scabies that’s been going on for the past month,” Cabrera said.
Texas border resident Jorge Garcia says word about the contagious skin infection is getting around.
“Our Border Patrol agents check on us all the time and they told us about the outbreak of scabies,” Garcia said.
Cabrera says the sickness doesn’t stop at scabies.
“We are starting to see chicken pox, MRSA staph infections, we are starting to see different viruses,” Cabrera said.
Garcia believes the viruses are not confined to the detention center. Not long ago, a group of border-crossers came knocking on his door. … Cabrera doesn’t believe the federal government is doing enough. He says other Border Patrol agents have contracted scabies and he fears it will spread quickly.
“It’s contagious, we are transporting people to different parts of the state and different parts of the country,” Cabrera said.
“Just the fact we are exposed to it, and so is everyone here in south Texas, it’s a great concern to us,” Garcia said. (ABC)

For the correct, perspective, read about the “dazzling” Randian, Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq:

When Objectivists eulogized the dazzling Randian Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq., most downplayed her trenchant opposition to the unfettered flow of migrants across the 1,940-mile-long border with Mexico. To that end, the late Dr. Cosman “never hesitated to put her own time, money, and neck on the line for her beliefs,” even volunteering as a patrolwoman with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.
The quintessential “Renaissance woman,” Dr. Cosman was an expert aviator, health-care policy analyst, marksman, and musician. But on immigration, she sounded a bum note. …
Ms. Cosman’s study of “the effects of illegal immigration on the United States health-care system” culminated in the article “Illegal Aliens and American Medicine,” published, in 2005, by The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. It addressed the effects on the health system of the bleeding Southwestern border. …
That Mexico is Swine Flu Ground Zero has thrown Dr. Cosman’s work into sharp relief… not only are illegal aliens never asked about their immigration status, they go unexamined for contagious diseases, and are granted free health passes and free medical care in the event that they fall ill.
The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences, given that they often hail from backward and benighted regions, where “diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago” still rage.
Tuberculosis had largely disappeared from America “thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs.” But a new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, endemic to Mexico, has crossed into the United States. It kills 60 percent of those infected. “Each illegal with MDR-TB coughs and infects 10 to 30 people, who will not show symptoms immediately. Latent disease explodes later.” …
“Illegal Aliens and American Medicine”:
TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to foreign-born people who have up to eight times higher incidence. Apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines, and Vietnam. …
Chagas disease is yet another disease that has been imported from Latin America and has infiltrated America’s blood supply. “Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs,” cautioned Dr. Cosman. “No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected. After 10 to 20 years, up to 30 percent will die when their hearts or intestines, enlarged and weakened by Chagas, burst.”
Seven thousand cases of leprosy over the last 30 years may seem negligible, but “leprosy, a scourge in Biblical days and in medieval Europe,” had been eradicated in the US. Now it’s back. By the reluctant admission of the New York Times, it was brought over from Asia and Latin America. …

MORE.

UPDATE (6/9): THE LOT OF LEGALS. Uncle Sam thoroughly tested me, a legal resident. They know where I lived, age 16, and what antibodies course through my veins. I would think it’s important to ensure newcomers don’t “assault” locals with deadly diseases.