Today, twenty-five Senate Republicans voted to allow Harry Reid to fund ObamaCare despite daily reports of the law’s destruction to the nation’s health care system and overall economy.

Campaign for Liberty favors health care reform which reduces cost through increased competition and reduced regulation, exactly the opposite of ObamaCare.

“By voting for cloture, Senate Republicans allowed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to fully fund and inflict ObamaCare on the nation,” said Campaign for Liberty President John Tate.

“The American people are sick and tired of Republicans refusing to stand up for the millions of Americans facing higher premiums and fewer options next year due to ObamaCare. I wish to thank Senators Cruz, Lee, Paul, and others for leading the fight against top-down health care.

“Campaign for Liberty will be sure to remind our members which Senators stood with the American people against ObamaCare, and which ones stood with Harry Reid and President Obama.”

Via (CNSNews.com) – “Twenty-five Republican senators—led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.)–voted today in favor of invoking cloture on the House-passed continuing resolution to fund the government past Monday, thus putting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) in a position where he could strip the bill of its provisions defunding Obamacare with a simple party-line majority instead of the 60 votes needed on cloture.”

These are the 25 Republicans who voted with Reid to invoke cloture on the CR:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

John Barrasso (R-WY)

Roy Blunt (R-MO)

John Boozman (R-AR)

Richard Burr (R-NC)

Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)

Jeff Chiesa (R-NJ)

Daniel Coats (R-IN)

Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Thad Cochran (R-MS)

Susan Collins (R-ME)

Bob Corker (R-TN)

John Cornyn (R-TX)

Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

John Hoeven (R-ND)

Johnny Isakson (R-GA)

Mike Johanns (R-NE)

Mark Kirk (R-IL)

Ron Johnson (R-WI)

John McCain (R-AZ)

Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

John Thune (R-SD)

Roger Wicker (R-MS)

These are the 19 Republican senators who voted against cloture:

Mike Crapo (R-ID)

Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Mike Enzi (R-WY)

Deb Fischer (R-NE)

Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Dean Heller (R-NV)

Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

Mike Lee (R-UT)

Jerry Moran (R-KS)

Rand Paul (R-KY)

Rob Portman (R-OH)

James Risch (R-ID)

Pat Roberts (R-KS)

Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Tim Scott (R-SC)

Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Richard Shelby (R-AL)

Pat Toomey (R-PA)

David Vitter (R-LA)

Debt-Ceiling Derangement

Debt, Democracy, Economy

Here are some salient points I’ve picked from Anthony de Jasay’s essay, “Shall We Borrow from the Children?”:

* Government expenditure rises first, “with revenue seldom if ever catching up. The money never runs out, for unlike households, the government can always borrow whatever it needs to cover the deficit, almost regardless of how large it is. It owns a sort of widow’s curse whose magic lies in the state’s power to raise the taxes in the future that it has no stomach to raise in the present. The day of reckoning need never come, for old borrowing is always refinanced from new borrowing.”

* “… the markets tolerate high ratios for unsecured government borrowing whilst they would demand individual debtors to put up some security.”

* “Governments buy support by spending money, not by siphoning it away in taxes. Spending now and deferring the matching taxes to an indefinite future is dictated by the most elementary political know how and it should not surprise nor shock anyone to see it happen again and again, especially when elections approach and politicians start getting desperate. They are not wicked [I disagree], they are just playing by the democratic rules. That the electorate is quite content with these rules, or at least does not try to alter them is perhaps more difficult to explain. It may be that the bulk of the electorate just does not see the connection and cannot be bothered to think about it.” [Or perhaps they are “wicked”?]

* “The US has tried to stem [the deficit and public debt problem] by placing a ceiling on the federal debt, a measure whose only effect is to oblige the Congress to raise the debt ceiling every time the rising debt catches up with it.”

[SNIP]

The “contrast between [the electorate’s] collective and private behavior” is evident in the polls, if they are to be believed. “Americans strongly oppose government shutdown,” yet “the majority of Americans [also] oppose President Obama’s demand that Congress raise the debt ceiling without any spending cuts—by a margin of nearly two to one.” [Heritage]

Health and Human Services Fibs About Insurance Premiums

Healthcare

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released a report full of “happy talk about how premiums will be ‘lower than originally expected,” writes Avik Roy at Forbes. “The reality is starkly different”:

Absent is “the stat that really matters: how much rates will go up next year, under Obamacare, relative to this year, prior to the law taking effect. …Former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin agrees. “There are literally no comparisons to current rates. That is, HHS has chosen to dodge the question of whose rates are going up, and how much. Instead they try to distract with a comparison to a hypothetical number that has nothing to do with the actual experience of real people.”

The Manhattan Institute has “conducted two comparisons between pre-ACA data and post-ACA data, as reported by HHS. The first comparison is between the cheapest plan available to 27-year-olds pre- and post-Obamacare. The second is between the cheapest plan available to the average exchange participant, and to the typical 40-year-old pre-Obamacare. … many 27-year-olds will face steep increases in the underlying cost of individually-purchased insurance under Obamacare. For the states where we have data—the 36 reported by HHS, plus nine others that we had compiled for our map that HHS didn’t report—rates will go up for men by an average of 97 percent; for women, 55 percent. …
… Middle-class Americans face the double-whammy of higher insurance premiums, and higher taxes to pay for other people’s subsidies. …For months, we’ve heard about how Obamacare’s trillions in health care subsidies were going to save America from rate shock. It’s not true. If you shop for coverage on your own, you’re likely to see your rates go up, even after accounting for the impact of pre-existing conditions, even after accounting for the impact of subsidies.”

More at “The Apothecary, With Avik Roy.”

Pat Buchanan:

“If Obamacare is funded, the subsidies starting in January will constitute a morphine drip from which America’s health-care system will not recover. If not stopped now, Obamacare is forever. …
…Americans don’t want a dignified surrender on Obamacare. They want someone to drive a stake through Obamacare.
House Republicans need to tell the country: Come hell or high water, we’re not voting to fund Obamacare. We will pass a CR on everything else in the budget, but Obamacare is not coming out of this House alive.”

MORE.

The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us

Business, Economy, EU, Free Markets, Iran, Media, Russia, The State

“The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

To listen to U.S. government officials there is only an upside to the punitive sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and a reluctant European Union. Consequently, the emphasis is forever on how to toughen the punishment; never on whether to lift economic sanctions on the long-suffering people of Iran.

But what about the effects of trade boycotts on American businesses?

Chris Harmer of The Institute for the Study of War estimates that the Boeing Company alone forfeits a minimum of $25 billion in business every year because of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran, a niche market that is filled by the Russians. Overall, Harmer puts the value to U.S. business of trade lost due to the economic embargo on Iran at approximately $50 billion per annum.

For example, Iran imports $1.5 billion worth of cars a year, the beneficiaries of which are companies like Nissan, Toyota and Peugeot (when they might have been General Motors and Chrysler). Peugeot does an added half a billion dollars’ worth of commerce with Iran just in car parts.

The Iranian economy, moreover, has diversified and is adapting to life without the U.S. The rest of the world—pockets in Europe and most of Asia—has not isolated Iran, with the result that the country has many trading partners other than the U.S. And while Iran has lost petroleum revenue due to sanctions, the trend will not endure. China, Japan and South Korea are hungry for the country’s crude.

Not to be overlooked are the costs to Americans of sanction enforcement, avers Harmer. In addition to the opportunity costs—the missed business aforementioned—there are “direct costs.” The Office of Foreign Asset Control in the U.S. Treasury Department squanders around $1 billion a year in developing lists of “financial institutions that are subject to sanctions,” and then infringing on the rights of individuals and companies to freely exchange privately owned property.

“Indirect costs” are incurred in the course of cultivating a massive U.S. intelligent infrastructure—a veritable alphabet soup of agencies—upon which the Treasury draws in enforcing a regimen of sanctions.

So too are the “deterrent costs” borne by the American taxpayer who pays for patrolling the Persian Gulf, the Northern Arabian Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz. …

… As a general rule, state-enforced boycotts harm honest, hard-working Americans who use the economic means to earn their keep. …”

Read the entire column. “The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us” is now on WND.

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