It’s Thursday, April 4th, 2013…and though we planned on taking today off, Mother Nature decided to rain out our last 11 holes of golf, so we’re stuck in Florida with nothing to do...except blog!
So, without further ado, as well as some of the usual photo inserts and highlights, here’s The Gouge!
First up, two classic bits of common sense commentary from James Taranto and Best of the Web:
Eine Kleine Trauermusik
A liberal journalist is merely panicked when he should be filled with dread.
Joe Klein is in a panic. “I am really growing concerned about the sloppiness of this Administration,” he frets in a Time.com post today. It follows up on a post yesterday in which he bemoans what the headline calls the “incompetence” of the ObamaCare implementation effort:
Let me try to understand this: the key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care superstores–called exchanges. The Administration has had three years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.
This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning?
At this point we had planned a glorious I-told-you-so–a merciless mockery of Klein for having been a cheerleader for ObamaCare and only now having come to see what was obvious to the rest of us at the time. If you want to read such a column, we recommend the one from Sept. 10, 2010, on Klein’s colleague Mark Halperin. For it turns out that unlike Halperin, Klein told you so too.
Klein did, like Halperin, get the short-term politics of ObamaCare wrong, writing on March 4, 2010, that “if it passes–contrary to the conventional wisdom–it will work to the Democrats’ advantage.” He also made the obligatory denunciations of Republicans, whose “position on health care has been outrageous. The party’s real goal has been to stop any and all legislation for political reasons–to deny Obama a major victory.”
That’s a perverse complaint. Politicians are supposed to be motivated by politics. Journalists are not. It is perverse for Klein to have rooted for an admittedly bad bill to become law in order to see the president triumph over the opposition.
On the merits, though, Klein was a strong critic of ObamaCare, which he faulted for its “cataclysmic inelegance . . . caused in large part by the President’s promise that the current, hopelessly complicated system would remain the same for the 80% of the public that’s satisfied with the insurance it has.” (He did not point out, as other ObamaCare critics did, that that promise would be impossible to fulfill.)
On May 6, 2010, Klein made a more general critique of the Democratic Party, one that his current pieces echo. “Democrats tend to be more interested in legislating than in managing,” he wrote:
They come to office filled with irrational exuberance, pass giant fur balls of legislation–stuff that often sounds fabulous, in principle–and expect a stultified bureaucracy, bereft of the incentives and punishments of the private sector, to manage it all with the efficiency of a bounty hunter. This has always been the strongest conservative argument against government activism. Traditionally, Republicans were more concerned with good management than Democrats–until the Reagan era, when the “government is the problem” mantra took hold. If you don’t believe in government, you don’t bother much with governing efficiently.
The claim that Republicans “don’t believe in government” is a straw man, one we wish were closer to the truth than it is. The lone example Klein cited is the appointment of an allegedly incompetent man to head a federal agency during the Bush administration. But Republicans during the Bush administration certainly did not govern as if they didn’t “believe in government,” or even as if they believed government should be smaller. Spending went up and up, and 2003 saw the creation of a massive new entitlement, Medicare Part D.
There’s also something odd about the way Klein framed the problem. Democrats and Republicans, he suggested, give short shrift to managerial effectiveness for opposite reasons: Democrats because they’re more concerned about increasing the size of government, Republicans because they’re (supposedly) more interested in reducing it.
But actually that’s the same reason: Both parties are more interested in what government should do than in how it should do it. Even if Republicans on the whole haven’t actually been determined to shrink government–and we should note that isn’t as true as it used to be, thanks to the Tea Party movement–they at least differ with Democrats over how fast and how big it should grow. Whereas every Republican voted against ObamaCare because it was too big, most Democrats voted against Medicare Part D because it was too small.
What Klein wishes for is a division of labor in which the two parties would cooperate to make government bigger. He’d like the Republicans to reinvent themselves as a nonideological party devoted to effective management, which would allow the Democrats to focus on expanding government. In such a world, Democrats would face no serious resistance to their legislative efforts, and there would be less risk of ObamaCare-style failures because the elephants’ job would be to clean up after the donkeys.
On this part of the argument, however, Klein’s thinking seems to be changing without his being completely aware of it. This is the conclusion of his “ObamaCare’s incompetence” post yesterday:
One thing is clear: Obamacare will fail if [the president] doesn’t start paying more attention to the details of implementation, if he doesn’t start demanding action. And, in a larger sense, the notion of activist government will be in peril–despite the demographics flowing the Democrats’ way–if institutions like the VA and Obamacare don’t deliver the goods. Sooner or later, the Republican Party may come to understand that its best argument isn’t about tearing down the government we have, but making it run more efficiently.
Sooner or later, the Democrats may come to understand that making it run efficiently is the prerequisite for maintaining power.
Klein is experiencing some cognitive dissonance, isn’t he? “The notion of activist government will be in peril,” he says in one breath. Well, no wonder he’s panicked! But in the next breath he reassures himself that the Republicans will eventually come to their senses, embrace managerialism, and who knows, maybe even save ObamaCare.
Assuming that by “activist government” Klein means government of large and growing size and scope–we can imagine a government that is at once limited and “activist,” but we doubt Klein can–it seems to us that it is indeed likely to be increasingly imperiled. Klein should be filled with dread, not just panic, because the peril comes from a much more formidable source than the Republican Party: reality itself. And it’s not only ObamaCare that’s in danger but the entire post-New Deal welfare state.
The New York Times’s Jackie Calmes, surprisingly enough, shines a flashlight at the problem in a story titled “Misperceptions of Benefits Make Trimming Them Harder”:
President Obama had Senate Republicans nodding in agreement during a recent ice-breaking dinner as he described a basic problem for the nation’s fiscal future: For each dollar that Americans pay for Medicare, they ultimately draw about $3 in benefits. What’s more, he added, most people do not understand that.
By his point that evening, the president was referring to the widespread and incorrect view, especially among older Americans, that Medicare recipients get only what they have paid for through taxes, premiums and medical co-payments. Now that misperception is making it all the harder for politicians to consider trimming those benefits or raising out-of-pocket expenses as they seek to restrain Medicare spending that is rising unsustainably while baby boomers age and medical prices increase.
This problem didn’t begin with Obama, and you can’t even blame George W. Bush: “The idea among Americans that they get back what they paid for, with some rate of return, dates to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legislative marketing of Social Security nearly 80 years ago.”
As future Enron adviser Paul Krugman noted in 1996, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. So is Medicare. Politicians have conned workers into thinking of their payroll taxes as an investment and their future benefits as an asset that belongs to them. In reality, the government pays out benefits by taxing current workers and borrowing money–effectively a tax on future workers.
Like any Ponzi scheme, such a system is sustainable only as long as the number of suckers–sorry, workers–continues to grow and the number of beneficiaries doesn’t grow too quickly.
In that sense, the demographic trends of the middle third of the 20th century were quite lucky. The baby boom provided a massive number of new workers, starting around the mid-1960s, to support generations of retirees whose numbers had been diminished by two world wars. The effect of the baby boom was magnified by the rise of feminism, as women’s participation in the labor force exploded, rising, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, from 37.7% in 1960 to 60.2% in 2000. (During the same period, the male rate declined from 83.3% to 74.7%.)
The abundance of workers paying payroll taxes made it possible to keep the pyramid going and to provide ever more generous benefits to the baby boomers’ progenitors. But the blessing of the baby boom is in the process of becoming a curse. Yesterday’s army of workers is tomorrow’s army of beneficiaries. Baby boomers were far less fertile than their parents, in part because women were focusing on commercial work at the expense of home and hearth. That compounds both problems: those women are now among the retirees due benefits in their own right, and the children they forwent are not among the workers paying taxes to support them.
How this all turns out is anyone’s guess, and it’s possible to imagine a scenario in which it ends well. Perhaps, for instance, robotics will provide a (literal) deus ex machina, increasing productivity so much that the needs of the elderly can be provided for by a relatively small workforce. But to be honest, you’d have to give us pretty long odds to get us to take that bet.
Barring such a miracle, it seems clear that both the current entitlement state and the current ideological division between the parties are unsustainable over the long term. The best-case outcome would seem to involve the emergence of some sort of consensus for smaller government, exactly the prospect that has Klein panicked. But while the Republicans have moved in this direction, so far the Democrats seem convinced that their short-term political interests are best served by a resolute defense of the status quo.
They have good reason to be convinced of that. Voters who’ve been promised government benefits are going to be furious when the government is unable to deliver, and it’s rational for each party to attempt to direct that blame at the other one. But this leaves the possibility that the nation’s finances will collapse in a convulsive crisis.Regardless of your views about the ideal size and scope of government, that prospect is cause for dread.
Can you say…
…Greece?!?Why do you think the Dims are so keen on taking your guns?
Thus, as this related item details, sanity becomes a voice crying in the wilderness:
Thank You for Smoking
Liberals are smoking alright!
National Journal’s Ron Fournier, the inventor of “accountability journalism,” bravely speaks truth to power in a profile of Rep. Scott Rigell, a Virginia Republican:
I didn’t know it at the time but I had happened to catch Rigell at his career’s most important hour, precisely as he sought to extricate himself from a political vise. On the federal budget and guns, Rigell stayed true to his conservative roots but had the uncommon audacity to insist upon facts, reason, and common sense.
And for that, he was punished.
This column is not just about Rigell. This one House member’s tale is sadly emblematic of what ails Washington today: hyper-partisanship in politics and new media; powerful and unaccountable interest groups; vast amounts of undocumented money; and a Congress corrupted by the system. . . .
Rigell holds a quaint view that, until the recent past, was universally accepted in Washington. “He is,” Rigell said, “my president.” . . .
“I cannot serve nor can I lead by fear,” Rigell told me this week. “At some point, I will be making my last ride home from Washington. I don’t know when that will be, but I have got to know that I’ve done all I could to get this country on the right path.” This is the modest goal of a modest man stuck in a system that punishes common sense.
We just hope Fournier was outdoors when he wrote this article. Otherwise, it’s such a puff piece it surely would have violated the District of Columbia’s smoking ban.
Speaking of smoking dope, as Jonathan Tobin records at Commentary Magazine, Dimocrats are conducting foreign policy on the same basis as their management of the economy:
Rockets, Hate and Kerry’s Fool’s Errand
Two weeks have passed since President Obama spoke to an audience of Israeli students and urged them to pressure their government to make peace with the Palestinians. To further that aim, Secretary of State John Kerry is expected back in the country this week to push for a renewal of peace talks. Kerry will busy himself with shuttling between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. But while Kerry talks, the deteriorating cease-fire between Israel and Hamas along the Gaza border is illustrating the futile nature of his mission.
Palestinians fired rockets again into southern Israel from Gaza this week, showing that the cease-fire Hamas agreed to after Israel’s November counter-offensive to stop such outrages may be collapsing. This shows that despite Washington’s focus on propping up Abbas as a credible partner for peace, the independent Palestinian state in all but name in Gaza still has the ability to veto any hopes for an end to the conflict. But it also puts the entire enterprise of peacemaking in a different perspective. As much as the president seemed to place the onus for negotiating a deal on Israel, the armed terrorist camp in Gaza serves to not only maintain the level of violence on a low if persistent flame, but also keeps the pressure on Abbas to find more excuses to not talk to an Israeli government that has already said it will negotiate without preconditions. The reality of Palestinian politics has an unfortunate way of outstripping American diplomatic initiatives, something Obama should have taken into consideration before sending Kerry out on this latest fool’s errand.
Abbas has already demonstrated repeatedly that he is in no position to seriously negotiate peace with Israel, let alone sign such an agreement. But that isn’t stopping Kerry from diving into a new round of shuttle diplomacy any more than the reality of Hamas’s hegemony in Gaza is causing him to ponder the fact that a divided Palestinian leadership makes a deal impossible.
According to numerous reports, the current sticking point for getting Abbas back to the negotiating table is his demand that Israel release long-term security prisoners as a “goodwill gesture,” an issue that’s been prioritized because of sympathy generated by the death of a 64-year-old Palestinian in Israeli custody. But this is just one more of a long list of excuses that Abbas has trumped up in order to avoid talks rather than a genuine obstacle to peace.
The issue of the prisoners is often represented in the international press as one of concern for the fate of Palestinian protesters who have been unjustly jailed by Israelis in order to suppress dissent. But the prisoner who just died is a perfect illustration of just how misleading that assumption can be. The late prisoner was incarcerated for his role in sending a suicide bomber to blow up an Israeli café, not for conducting a peaceful protest or even throwing a rock.
As Kerry ought to know, the real obstacle to peace isn’t Israeli settlements or building in Jerusalem. It is the hate for Jews and Israel that is fueling the rocket fire from Gaza. But instead of trying to mollify Abbas’s bogus concerns about prisoners, the secretary would probably do more to advance the cause of peace were he to address the ongoing fomenting of hatred by the official PA media.
As Palestinian Media Watch reports, this month a children’s program on official Palestinian Authority television showed a child reciting a poem that referred to both Zionists and the “sons of pigs”—a traditional Muslim reference for Jews. The poem, which was received with applause, spoke of Jews killing children, raping women in the streets and defiling the Koran and Jerusalem, while urging Muslims to rise up and defeat them. So long as such expressions are not only considered mainstream enough for general Palestinian discourse but are part of the PA’s education agenda, peace isn’t difficult; it’s impossible.
This shows once again that the gaps between the two sides in the Middle East conflict are not about borders but about a willingness to live in peace. PA propaganda isn’t just outrageous; it directly contradicts President Obama’s endorsement of the right of Jews to live in peace in their historic homeland. Until that changes, Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy will be just a waste of time.
Next up, courtesy of George Lawlor and the Washington Examiner, Shika Dalmia suggests…
Obamacare is Obama’s Iraq War
Not even the most ardent defenders of Obamacare — aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — claim anymore that the law will lower health coverage costs for Americans. How, then, will it achieve universal coverage, its central goal?
The short answer is, it won’t.
Last week, major insurers warned of double-digit premium hikes for small businesses and individuals when Obamacare goes into effect next year. Likewise, the nonpartisan Society of Actuaries this week estimated that costs to insurers that provide coverage to individuals will rise 32 percent on average within the first three years of the law, with premium increases sure to follow.
Similar analyses last year had already forced MIT’s Jonathan Gruber to admit that his projections that the law would lower premiums for young and old alike were wrong — even though his projections were instrumental in securing Obamacare’s passage. Gruber’s revised estimates now show that even the least affected states, such as Colorado, will experience premium hikes of nearly 20 percent by 2016.
Clearly, the word “affordable” should be scratched from the law for the sake of truth in advertising. But what about the “protection” part — namely, universal coverage?
That too is a lie.
Before Obamacare, every percentage-point increase in premiums would price a few hundred thousand people out of the market. Obamacare’s supporters, however, claim that the law’s complicated scheme of mandates and subsidies will prevent this from happening. But that’s unlikely, notes Greg Scandlen, founder of Consumers for Health Care Choices. For starters, the Supreme Court dealt a big blow to Obamacare’s key mechanism for covering the uninsured by making its Medicaid expansion optional for states — and many states are opting out. An even bigger problem, Scandlen notes, is that Obamacare has created perverse incentives that will encourage employers to drop coverage in droves — and employees to forgo it in droves.
The law’s play-or-pay mandate requires employers with more than 50 full-time employees to offer a lavish panoply of benefits or else pay a penalty. Many small businesses will simply choose to stay small to avoid the mandate, which means less hiring and more uninsured.
As for large companies, McKinsey & Company, a private consulting group, estimated that nearly 30 percent will pay rather than play — that is, pay modest fines instead of paying several times as much to give robust coverage to employees. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this might cause between 5 million and 20 million Americans to lose their employer-provided coverage. Former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin puts this figure at a whopping 35 million.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand their calculation here: The penalty will cost a company $2,000 per employee, while a family insurance plan costs $12,000 to $16,000. This means that the company can pay the penalty, give employees generous raises to buy their own coverage, and still come out ahead.
But will employees buy coverage or just pocket the extra wages?
Obamacare’s supporters bet they will buy insurance because Obamacare will subsidize the purchase and because they will otherwise have to pay penalties under the law’s individual mandate.
But Scandlen notes that the penalties are meaningless. Not only are they small, they are easily avoided. The only way Uncle Sam can extract them is by subtracting them from taxpayers’ income tax refunds. Simply avoid excessive tax withholding and the feds have no way of collecting.
As for the subsidies, Scandlen maintains that their allure, too, is overrated. They will be relatively modest for middle-income families, and to qualify, purchasers will be required to obtain very expensive “Cadillac” coverage.
People will also have the option of waiting to buy insurance until they get sick. Thanks to Obamacare’s “guaranteed issue” provision, insurance companies can’t turn anyone away, even those calling from the intensive care unit. This will only deepen the problem of the “adverse selection death spiral” as healthy people stay out of the insurance market while sick people jump in. This, in turn, will trigger even more premium hikes.
The Iraq War cost $1 trillion and produced a quagmire abroad. Obamacare will cost $1 trillion and will create a quagmire at home. Americans need an exit strategy.
Meanwhile…
Female Marines Fail Infantry Officer Course
The only two women to participate in the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course (IOC) failed ongoing tests to determine which infantry positions should be available to women, according to the Marine Corps Times:
The women failed the introductory Combat Endurance Test, a punishing test of physical strength and endurance, officials at Marine Corps headquarters said Tuesday. The latest class began March 28 at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., with 110 lieutenants participating. Ninety-six men passed the initial endurance test. Twelve men and two women — the only female Marines taking part — failed.
The two women both volunteered to participate in the IOC. Two other women had previously volunteered in September but also failed.
Oh…and for those of you benighted enough to believe Team Tick-Tock won’t further weaken our national security posture by changing the physical requirements for women, guess again:
And In a follow-up to Wednesday’s item contrasting the ongoing failure of subsidized passenger rail versus the success of freight trains, our friend Ket forwarded the following photo of his son traveling on the Vermonter:
He also sent us this informative article from Forbes:
And since we’re on the subject of the facts, courtesy of Bill Meisen, The Dear Misleader offers his own misrepresentation thereof:
Obama: Newtown Shooter Gunned Down 20 Children With ‘Fully Automatic Weapon’
At a fundraiser last night in San Francisco, President Barack Obama said that the Newtown killer gunned down 20 children using a “fully automatic weapon.” From the official transcript, provided by the White House:
Now, over the next couple of months, we’ve got a couple of issues: gun control. (Applause.) I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon — by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.
According to the prosecutor, Stephen J. Sedensky III, the killer, Adam Lanza, “killed all 26 victims inside Sandy Hook Elementary School with a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle before taking his own life with a Glock 10 mm handgun. He says Lanza had another loaded handgun with him inside the school as well as three, 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster,” ABC previously reported.
Each of the guns used is a semi-automatic weapon, and not one is an automatic weapon.
So either Obama is wrong–or he revealed.
Or he’s deliberately misrepresenting the truth, i.e., LYING!
Hells bells, as this video, courtesy of Carl Polizzi confirms, even one of the patron saint of Liberalism recognizes the value of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens:
Ya gotta love it when a supposedly unbiased “reporter” literally doesn’t know whether to sh*t or go blind!
On the Lighter Side…
That’s all for now; here’s hoping for clearing skies overnight.
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